


Sedona

by Shearmouth



Series: I Wrote This When I Was 15: Old FF dot Net fics [6]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hurt Ethan, Hurt William Brandt, Hurt/Comfort, Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21635098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shearmouth/pseuds/Shearmouth
Summary: When Ethan's plane is bombed after a mission he is presumed dead. His team grieves even as they hold out hope of his survival, and Ethan, injured but alive, struggles across England to evade whoever has targeted him. But with no safe way of contacting his friends and new, unknown enemies on his tail, it's going to be a long run home.
Relationships: Ethan Hunt & Everyone
Series: I Wrote This When I Was 15: Old FF dot Net fics [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1559170
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	1. Fallen Angels

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. This is a fic that took four years in total to complete, and I started it when I was in high school. It's full of holes and is pretty messy, but I'm still proud of it and fond of it. Please be gentle.

Even after all he had seen, the sky never ceased to amaze him.

Ethan gazed out the window of the jet, drinking in the magnificence of the clouds and land that was growing steadily less detailed beneath him as the plane climbed into the sky. Of all the kinds of adrenaline he had experienced– and there were many– the rush that came from being high in the air, of seeing the spectacular blue sky thrown out above him like the ceiling of the gods–

Enough to make him wax poetic. The agent scowled, then chuckled to himself as the relief of being skybound rose with the altitude. Poetic, fine. Let it be not said all agents are crass, unthinking minions of espionage.

Ethan felt a shadow pass over him, his chuckle dying. Not all. But some.

The mission was over. He was going home, away from England, away from Berns and Harvey, the two knuckleheads in the forward compartment with not enough humanity between them to fill a thimble. Ethan wondered for the hundredth time why the Secretary had sent him on this random mission in London with the two others, agents he had never worked or even trained with. And frankly, after this last week’s experience he could have lived without doing either. Talk about crass. He’d thought Sean Ambrose was eager to get his gun off. Ethan’s old double could’ve taken a lesson or two about itchy trigger fingers from these characters.

Oh well. They were new, and they would learn. Ethan had already managed to knock some sense into their heads. And he was flying home now, to the people he really wanted to work with: his team.

“Agent Hunt?” Ethan looked up from the window to see the private jet’s single flight attendant pushing a drink cart down the aisle. She was new, he noticed, if her stiff posture and flighty eyes, worried about doing something wrong, were anything to go by.

“No, thank you,” he replied, smiling. “I’ll probably take you up on that offer later, though. I appreciate it.” She smiled back nervously and rolled on. 

He’d sleep later. Dregs of adrenaline and focus from the op were still working their way out of his system, poking him consistently to stay alert, stay aware. He was exhausted, his face tight with tiredness, but he knew from experience that sleep would not come for a while. For now though, he was content with seeing the British countryside fall away. He settled back at the window.

Benji was British. Maybe his home was somewhere down there. No, wait he was from Manchester, Ethan thought he’d told him once. Farther north. He still sometimes went back on leave to visit his family.

Where was Benji now, and the rest of the team? It had been a week since Ethan left, which, considering some of his missions in the past, was not that long. But a lot could happen in seven days, especially to an agent.

Let’s see. When he’d left, Jane had been finishing an intense secondary course on hand-to-hand combat. She was already a second-degree black belt in tae kwon do, but after Cobalt she’d wanted grittier streetfighting skills, plus it had helped her bullet wound heal. Like she wasn’t already terrifying enough with axe kicks and a serious left hook. Now she could fight dirty.

He’d missed her this mission, her levelheadedness and her fiery no-bullshit attitude. Jane would put the nimrods up forward in their places in about ten seconds flat if she ever got her hands on them.

And aside from wanting to waste every asset they got their hands on as soon as their usefulness ran out, Berns and Harvey couldn’t find their way around the tech scene to save their lives, and that was by Ethan’s own fairly low standards. He’d longed for his computer genius when they’d been wasting time wrestling through firewalls and coded letters, stuff that Ethan knew for a fact Benji could breeze through before his first cup of coffee. And he’d missed the Brit’s comedian quality, the release he always seemed to provide in a bad situation. Berns and Harvey had little to no sense of humor.

Brandt would’ve been good to have too. When the Secretary called Ethan it had been barely two days after their last mission. Granted, that particular op had been a short one, but on top of all their day-to-day duties it was stressful enough to have Brandt singing in the shower of the agents’ locker room when he thought the others couldn’t hear. They’d reached the deep end. Ethan had practically ordered him onto a five-day leave after that before the poor guy completely snapped. Five days…which meant he would’ve punched the ticket back in a few days ago. Ethan wondered what the Secretary had put him onto. Just because she kept the four of them together on any mission she got the chance, they couldn’t stick together all the time no matter how well they operated when they did. Ethan had missed his wingman. He always knew Brandt had his back, noticed the things Ethan didn’t. It was hard to become a full leader again, and not have anyone he could really rely on for an entire operation.

But all that was over for now. He was going home.

He pulled away from the window, settling back against the plush seat. It would be a five-hour flight back to the States, and they wouldn’t arrive until late. He may as well try to get some sleep now. He closed his eyes.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

Ethan blinked, scowled at the obnoxious alarm coming from the cockpit. It was so faint he wasn’t worried, any major one would be much louder. And he could hear no tones of worry from the pilots.

He closed his eyes again.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

God, that really was irritating. He turned, trying to cover his ears, too tired to care what it meant.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

The hairs on the backs of Ethan’s neck prickled. He started upright. That wasn’t coming from the cockpit. The beeping was in the back of the plane–

_Beep. Beep. Beeeee…_

Instinct kicked in. Ethan threw himself forward. “GET DO–“

The explosion from the hidden bomb tore through the rear of the jet with the force of a hurricane. Suddenly all Ethan was aware of were blips of information.

Heat searing his back and neck and hurling him violently toward the cockpit.

The sickening sensation of falling.

Screaming. The pilots, the agents, screaming.

The sky that had welcomed them just moments before had betrayed them.

Ethan stumbled upright. He was in the aisle of the plane, just behind the forward cabin. His back flared with pain, but adrenaline quickly iced it. He could feel the plane’s nose starting to tip down, threatening to head into a full nosedive.

“BERNS! HARVEY!” He could hear them still screaming. He fought his way forward against the growing G-force. His fellow agents were locked into their seats, frozen, white-faced and shrieking. There was little he could do about them.

Ethan risked a glance back. The entire rear of the plane was in flames. As he watched, it gave a massive wrench and a huge section of the tail area ripped free.

Air rushed out of the gaping hole. Ethan grabbed onto the backs of the seats to keep from getting sucked back and out of the plane into open air. He struggled forward as the plane kept falling.

He reached the cockpit. The copilot was passed out in his seat, but the pilot was holding onto the controls for dear life, wrestling for steadiness. Ethan felt what was left of his stomach drop as he saw the ocean, capped with white-crested waves, roaring up to meet them. Ethan shoved the copilot out of the seat and took his place at the secondary controls. He pulled back with all his strength as he and the pilot fought to bring to plane to bear.

Slowly, he saw the nose rise. His hope lifted. If they could try for a belly landing on the water–

And then the second bomb went off.

It had to be. Jet fuel didn’t combust, didn’t even burn. It was something else that exploded in the main compartment of the plane, tearing metal, ripping plastic and industrial-strength glass, shooting fire throughout the body of the jet.

And it ended up being the thing that saved Ethan Hunt’s life.

A conflagration of heat and power howled through the remains of the aircraft. The fireball incinerated Berns and Harvey, tore apart the fuselage and smashed into Ethan with enough force to send him flying through the cockpit window.

Plexiglass shattered around him, scraping his skin. Ethan felt himself thrown onto the nose of the jet, fresh pain burning through his shoulder and chest– and then he was falling, away from the jet and the fire, into the air.

A second later, they hit the water.

Salty cold slammed into Ethan and pulled him under. Instinct took over again and he kicked, dimly aware that his right arm was no longer working. He broke the surface, gasping for air. He wiped his eyes and looked around.

The plane was nothing but burning wreckage in the waves, much of it quickly sinking. Ethan kicked and half-paddled away, knowing that if there was anything left of the main body, it would create a hole in the water that sucked down anything near enough to get caught. He grabbed onto a floating piece of debris–the burned remnants of a seat cushion–and clung to it, still kicking away from the crash. Now that the adrenaline of the fall was wearing off, the pain was coming back. His ribs ached and his back and neck felt badly burned. A long slice along his right forearm from when he’d crashed out the window burned from the salt. His right shoulder hurt like hell and didn’t move properly. He looked down at it and groaned. Yep, dislocated. He raised it gingerly onto the cushion, the blood from the cut smearing into the material. He’d relocate it later, when he reached somewhere safe.

Talking of which…where was he?

Ethan paused in his kicking. He was probably far enough away to avoid the pulldown. His agent training was still engaged though, and he heard his instructor’s voice in his head. _What do you do when you find yourself in a tight spot of any kind? Breathe. Observe and assess the danger and rank it in order of immediate concern. Is there a horde of angry terrorists coming your way? Worry about that before you think about the superficial knife wound in your leg that will probably get infected later. Then act on your assessments. Use what you know, Ethan._

Ethan took a deep breath, consciously working to slow his heart rate. He looked around, assessing the situation.

The sea was rough but not violent, not yet. He could stay afloat without too much trouble if the swell stayed this long and spaced-out. When he came up high in the next wave, he caught a glimpse of land. The England shoreline, a few miles distant.

He looked at the sun. He had a couple hours before dark. He turned toward the far-off shoreline, placed the cushion in front of him with his injured arm on top, and began kicking. He had a long way to go, and a lot to think about. Like what the hell had just freaking happened.

It had been a bomb. He’d heard the beeping too late. It had clearly been activated once they were airborne, otherwise he’d have heard it beforehand. And there had been two, one going off a little after the first.

It had either had a timer, or someone had set it off once they were in the air. If the second was true, it narrowed the list of suspects considerably.

It couldn’t have been the pilots; the beeping had come from the rear of the plane. It could have been done remotely, but something made Ethan doubt them. They both looked plenty scared when they were plummeting toward their deaths. Berns and Harvey had been up forward. A turncoat agent was always possible, but why do it now, at the end of a mission? They could’ve easily slipped away when they were in London.

Who else was there? They were the only passengers on–oh.

The flight attendant. She hadn’t been stiff because she was new. She was stiff because her life was about to end. And the alarm had only started once she’d left the rear compartment.

Ethan sighed. Kamicazis were always hard to swallow. There was something distinctly wrong with seeing someone alive and breathing and minutes later knowing they had just martyred themselves in order to take other lives. He rubbed a hand, cold and salty with seawater, over his face.

So, a planted bomber who wasn’t supposed to come back. Which meant there was someone else pulling the strings behind this. Who? They’d finished the London mission and eliminated all targets and known affiliates. The group they took down would not have had the resources to acquire two bombs and a mole and get them both onto the plane their enemies were flying out on after the events of this week. Someone else had done this, and it had been premeditated. Finding out exactly who had planned it would take time and resources Ethan did not have currently floating in the freaking Celtic Sea.

Which left the next question: why? The pilots were IMF employed, in it for the pension after service. They had nothing to do with on-the-ground ops. Berns and Harvey were fresh out of the academy. In fact, Ethan felt with a sudden pang, this had only been their second mission. And despite their ability to piss off everyone in the room, Ethan didn’t think even they could make someone angry enough to blow up an IMF jet. They had been collateral damage here.

Which only left one agent.

He sighed again before scoffing lightly. This had been for him. He’d been the target of the bombing.

“Because I’m sooo popular,” he muttered aloud. His voice was lost in the hiss of the cresting waves. He pushed down the guilt. He could feel bad later. Right now he had survival to think about. He was injured, growing steadily colder and it was still a long swim to shore. He kept kicking, resting his chin on the cushion.

It was instinct more than anything else that made Ethan pause a few minutes later. Without the splashes of his kicking there was only his harsh breathing, the sound of the waves and something growing steadily over them, a familiar sound that made Ethan’s stomach drop with dread: the _whupwhupwhup_ of chopper blades. He froze, dropping his legs down so as little of his body as possible was on the surface.

Seconds later it appeared, flying low over the waves about a hundred yards to his left. It was coming from the mainland, heading for what was left of the plane.

It was a sleek, black military-issue chopper, but he saw no insignia on it. In fact, there were no identifying marks whatsoever that he could see, not even a registration. Goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold rose on his arms. He stayed frozen, hoping his black clothing and the dark material of the cushion would help him blend in to the inky ocean.

The chopper circled twice around the area of wreckage. Each time Ethan saw black-clad people peering out of the main bay, scanning the water. He kept still, occasionally kicking backward if the waves brought him a little closer to the crash site.

After the second circle, the chopper started spiraling outward in an ever-widening pattern. Within seconds it was close enough to Ethan for the water kicked up from the rotors to dash him in the face. Another moment and they’d be right on top of him.

Whoever these people were, whoever had come after him, they weren’t done with him yet.

There was nothing for it. Ethan gritted his teeth, made a fist with his right hand, and wrenched his shoulder back into place. Swallowing a scream, he pushed the cushion away and swam out. The chopper roared above him.

He dove.


	2. The Valley of the Shadow

Sorry, jet fuel does burn, my mistake. For the sake of the story, it was a second bomb though, and not the fuel exploding.

“Hey, um, you’re needed!”

The unfamiliar voice jolted Agent William Brandt out of his music-induced stupor and sent him stumbling out of the shower stall with a towel around his waist and a scowl on his face. “Excuse me?”

He’d been in the middle of one of his secret empty locker room jam sessions–at least he’d thought they were secret, until Ethan pushed him onto a five-day leave for fear of insanity and Jane had produced that tape of him singing “Layla” in the shower. He swore he’d never, ever give her reason to be pissed off at him again. But right now, the locker room was deserted with no agents arriving for a while, and Jane and Ethan weren’t here. Brandt had just come in from another brief, heavy operation, in which he was not only punched in the face about ninety freaking times but also chucked down a flight of stairs while wrestling with their target, who was, of course, built like goddamn Mr. Olympia. By the time they had gotten back to the base he was exhausted, achy, black-eyed, and in a bad enough mood to give a whole new meaning to the phrase “death glare.” He was in desperate need of unwinding and un-grossing with a radio and an endless supply of hot water. Any interruptions, living or otherwise, were in danger of incineration.

So he had to consciously restrain himself from laying into the nervous-looking kid before him until there was nothing left but a little heap of ash where he now stood. “The building had better on fire, corporal,” he growled. 

The intern gulped. “Sorry, Agent Brandt, but the Secretary sent me to come get you. She says she needs to speak with you.” 

Brandt groaned, scrubbing a hand over his still-wet face. “You gotta be kidding me. Can’t it wait until tomorrow? I have a date with the nearest horizontal surface.”

The intern bit his lip. “I’m really sorry sir, but she said it was urgent. Five minutes.” He turned on his heel and practically bolted from the locker room.

Brandt sighed before groaning again. He made his way over to the bench where his clothes lay piled and started yanking them on, his movements stiff with fatigue. His body ached, but already his mind was racing. Once an analyst, always an analyst.

It was unusual for the Secretary to call him in at the end of the day. Not another mission already, was it? Despite five day’s leave, Brandt needed at least eight hours of unbroken dreamtime tonight if he was to keep from falling over.

But if it wasn’t a new directive, Brandt thought with a frown, there was only one logical explanation: something was wrong, and it involved him.

Maybe he was getting fired. When his abused back muscles gave a hideous wrench as he pulled his shirt on, Brandt wasn’t sure that would entirely unwelcome. He finished dressing and staggered out of the locker room, leaving the rest of his gear behind.

One elevator ride later and he was outside the Secretary’s office. He squared his aching shoulders and went inside.

Right away, he knew something was off. It took him all of two seconds to figure out what.

The Secretary seated behind her desk in the middle of the room, her fingers steepled: normal. The books lining the walls, the windows overlooking the surrounding area, the chairs arranged around the room and before the Secretary’s desk: normal. The occupants of those chairs who turned their heads to see him arrive: not normal.

Benji and Jane, both in their field clothes, looked calm, but Brandt could see the confusion in their eyes. Brandt felt some of his weariness be replaced with suspicion and worry when he saw too the empty chair on Jane’s left, where Ethan usually sat. They were missing the fourth member of the team.

“Brandt,” said the Secretary, drawing his attention back to her. “Thank you for coming on such short notice. Please, sit down.”

Brandt studied her face as he sat down. She was a stern woman in her forties with coffee skin and long black hair done in hundreds of tiny braids. Today her countenance, usually shuttered and businesslike, was heavy with care. Brandt felt his worry increase.

“Secretary,” he said carefully. “Are you all right?”

She grimaced before sighing almost silently; it was more just a slump of her shoulders and hands. “Brandt, you know I can’t answer that on duty.” She grimaced again. “But I’ve just been informed of some bad news, which I have called you here to share, as it concerns you. I want you to know it pains me as much as it will you.”

Brandt felt all the blood drain from his face, though he did not change his expression.

“Secretary,” said Benji, “Where’s Ethan? If this concerns the team, he should be present.” Brandt felt Jane tense with him, hanging on her reply.

The Secretary’s hands fell flat onto the table. A muscle in her jaw worked. “Actually, it concerns him. Agent Hunt was on a mission in London for the past week with Agents Berns and Harvey. They had completed the mission and were on their way home via IMF issue jet.” She wouldn’t meet any of their eyes. “This afternoon at around fifteen hundred hours, an explosion of unknown origin went off inside the jet, causing it to crash in the Irish Sea.” check. The Secretary took a breath. “As far as we know, all passengers and crew were lost.”

Brandt felt like he’d been socked in the gut. To his surprise Jane didn’t miss a beat. “Have any bodies been found?” she asked, her voice steady.

The Secretary grimaced again. “We’ve analyzed the wreckage. The explosion,” she said carefully, “produced a fire of over a thousand degrees that would have surged through the plane seconds after the detonation. What little wreckage we have found has been charred almost beyond identification of the material. We believe it was a bomb, though nothing is proven yet. One thing for certain is that it is extremely unlikely anyone could have gotten out in time, and no one still inside could have survived. I don’t think there will be any bodies left to find, Jane.” Jane started at the use of her first name, as well as the sympathy in the Secretary’s voice, even as Brandt saw Jane’s hand fist in her lap until the knuckles turned white.

The Secretary looked into each of their faces for the first time, and there was an honest grief there. “I’m not saying don’t hope. But I think you should all start coming to terms with the fact that Ethan is most likely not coming home.”

For a moment there was silence as the three agents felt the words sink in. Not coming home. Not coming home. Not coming–

Brandt felt his hands going cold.

No. He would not go into shock. He’d grieve later, alone, but not here, not when he needed to be strong for his team. He stared hard at his hands in his lap, grounding himself. He could not speak. Luckily, they were there for him, as always.

“Will that be all, Secretary?” Benji asked hoarsely. 

The Secretary sighed again, fully this time. “I am giving each of you a week’s leave to process this. I know how much Ethan Hunt meant to each of you, especially as a leader. You should have some time to cope with his dea–disappearance. Other than that, yes, that is all.” She steepled her hands again. “Again, I am sorry. He was truly the best of us, and he will be sorely missed. I wish you all the best of luck.”

They knew their cue to leave. The agents rose and made for the door. Brandt kept his face blank, but his innards felt like they had been ground up and mixed with a cocktail of guilt, disbelief, and despair.

The office door shut behind them. Brandt looked up at Jane and Benji, his throat closing. Jane’s lip trembled, but she did not cry. Tears were already gathering at the corners of Benji’s eyes, but he would not let them fall either. For a second the three just looked at each other.

Brandt rubbed his eyes. “What do we do now?” he asked, his voice almost foreign in his ears.

Anger flashed in Jane’s eyes. “We hope,” she said, not a trace of trembling in her words. “This is Ethan Hunt we’re talking about. He’s survived worse. And we have no proof he’s dead.”

“We have no reason to believe he’s alive either, Jane,” Brandt shot back. “I mean, come on. It’s Ethan, but do you think even he could survive an exploding plane and falling thousands of feet into the ocean?” He knew it was despair talking, but he couldn’t keep the harsh words back.

Jane took a step forward. “What, you want us just to give up, Brandt?”

Brandt matched her step so they were practically nose-to-nose. “I’m saying be realistic! There’s no use for hope when there’s nothing to hope for! It just gets you burned in the end.”

“Do you even want him to come back?”

Brandt snarled. She’d gone too far. “I course I do, Jane! You think I don’t feel as shitty as you–“

“All right, KNOCK IT THE HELL OFF!” Benji yelled. 

Hearing the angry words coming out of their usually laid-back techie was enough to freeze Brandt mid-yell. He and Jane both looked at him in shock.

Benji’s face was red with anger. “That’s enough! Do you really think this is the time or place for a bitchfight? We’re outside of the bloody Secretary’s office! You’re being effing children!” Tears spilled down his cheeks even as he kept yelling. “Ethan would not want us acting this way. You need to calm the hell down. We’re all hurting. Grow up, both of you.” He took his jacket from his arm and slung it angrily over his shoulder. “And now, I’m going to get shitfaced. Have a nice evening.” Benji lifted his computer bag and stomped down the hallway, into the stairwell, and out of sight.

Brandt looked at Jane. She was still fuming. She put on her jacket and walked angrily away without saying a word. The door slammed behind her and echoed off the tile floors.

Brandt felt the anger draining out of him, leaving in its wake a bilious self-hatred. He stared at the place where seconds before, he’d had a team, before he’d driven them away with stupid words or lost them to a bomb.

And now, once again, he was alone.

Brandt started running.

He ran to the stairwell, down the steps three at a time, and out the entry hall, ignoring the startled calls of the people he rushed by. He burst out the doors into the Virginia evening.

Benji had given him a ride this morning, which meant he was getting home on foot. It was a good six miles to the tiny apartment where he dropped himself between missions, if he wasn’t with the team. The meeting house where they planned missions and held occasional movie nights was closer, but it technically belonged to Ethan, and the thought of going there without his team made him want to throw up.

He thought for a moment, then started running again, toward his apartment. It was winter, and his breath steamed in the air, but he didn’t care. He needed his muscles to burn and his lungs to feel frozen in his chest. Sometimes only by being in pain could he remind himself he was alive.

Brandt ran. He kept running even after nightfall when the temperature dropped, kept running through the rough parts of the city where the shadow shells of people huddled around bottles, ran under light and through the darkness. He ran until his entire body felt on fire, but the pain did not touch his mind. Inside, he was alone with his grief and guilt. He knew this wasn’t like him; he rarely lost control like this. But something inside him was cracking.

He’d left the base around sundown. It was near ten when he finally reached his apartment. He stopped before the door, his chest heaving. He was in good shape–he had to be, as a field agent–but a run that long in air this cold had even him doubled over until he recovered.

Brandt straightened. He was alone under the streetlight, but the darkness around him still had his agent senses prickling. He fished in his pocket for his keys.

His fingers brushed only fabric. The pocket was empty.

With a jolt, Brandt realized he’d left his keys in his bag…with all of his other gear….back at Langley…in the goddamn locker room.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Brandt felt all the air go out of his lungs. He slid down the apartment building wall and pulled his knees to his chest. All the weight of the day–the exhaustion from the previous mission, the shock of hearing about Ethan, the fatigue from the run–fell down on him with the force of a landslide. His breath came in short, sharp gasps. After a second, he realized he was crying. Hard. Tears made cold tracks down his cheeks.

God, he hated crying. He hadn’t cried in years. But here he was, huddled against a wall, sobbing and sobbing and unable to stop.

He wasn’t sure whom he was crying for, either. Himself? Out of guilt and self-pity? For his team, for driving them away? For Ethan?

Honestly, he wasn’t sure what he felt when he thought about his team leader. He’d gone through so much pain at the hands of Ethan Hunt, even if he was just collateral damage. He’d sacrificed a job, believed he’d gotten an innocent woman killed, and gotten dragged all over the world once back in field service because of him. But scars healed, and after spending over a year as a solid team with Ethan as their leader, Brandt had forgiven him without even realizing it. Ethan had earned his loyalty and friendship ten times over. But now he was dead, and Brandt had never actually told him to his face that he didn’t hold anything against him anymore. The knowledge of this made Brandt feel guilty to the point of nausea. He breathed deeply in through his nose and out through his mouth, struggling to bring his typhoon of emotion under control. Normally, he was so good at this; doing what the trainers had told him to, putting aside feeling and fear, keeping self-control at all times. Brandt was an analyst, for Christ’s sake, or had been at least. Logic and cold facts were his medium, his belief. He had leaned on them for so long, not letting his emotions get out of hand.

But tonight, something had broken in him, and for once he wasn’t Agent Brandt, experienced IMF operative. Tonight, he was just a man who was suffering.

He wasn’t sure how long he stayed there against the wall, cowering away from the world. A haze fell over him until he was no longer aware of the cold seeping into his bones. He was so withdrawn that he didn’t hear the footsteps bearing down on him. A hand fell on his shoulder.

Agents, even depressed, hypothermic ones, are still agents.

Brandt didn’t think. He leapt up, grabbed the hand on his shoulder and spun both of them around so the person was pinned against the brick wall. He was distantly aware of someone yelling. His right hand went to a throat while his left drew back to strike.

He looked up.

Smooth olive skin, black hair tangled from movement. Eyes red from crying set in a familiar face. Someone was still yelling, and he realized it was the person he had against the wall. What were they yelling? It sounded like a name…

“…–ant! Brandt! Brandt, it’s me, it’s Jane! Calm down!”

Jane. It was Jane. He’d yelled at her earlier, hadn’t he…? Why–

Suddenly he was aware of his back against a wall again, and two people were kneeling in front of him. Jane, and a guy with strawberry-blond hair and blue eyes that looked at him worriedly. Benji.

God, he was cold…

“Brandt? Can you hear me, Brandt?” Jane asked, her face and voice fading in and out of focus. Another blank spot, and then he felt them slinging his arms over their shoulders and bundling him into a–backseat?

“What…where…” he muttered, almost too tired to care.

“Relax, Brandt,” he heard Benji say. “It’s all right, mate, we’ve gotcha.” He felt the car start and begin to move.

“Where are we going?”

Jane was next to him, holding him steady, wrapping what felt like a blanket around his shoulders. “Home, Brandt. It’s okay. We’re going home.”

It was the last thing he heard before cold and exhaustion pulled him under and he surrendered to the dark.


	3. Ascent

Ethan was really sick of England. He’d hoped not to have to return for a while after this week’s mission. Now he never wanted to lay eyes on the damn foggy rock ever again.

But as he pulled himself onto the shoreline after dark, bloody, waterlogged and chilled to the bone, he didn’t remotely care where he was. He was grateful beyond words just to be on dry land.

After the helicopter had circled towards him, he’d swum deep into the water column and held his breath until the thudding of the rotors faded back towards land. It was almost beyond him–five minutes was a long time to go without oxygen, even for him, and all the while fighting to stay down with a strained shoulder– but he’d breached the surface and found his cushion again.

The rest of the swim had been a blur. It took several slow, cold hours of kicking through rolling swell to reach the shore, and by the time he got there the winter sun had hidden under the horizon again, taking what feeble warmth it had previously provided with it. Ethan had been in the water so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to move his fingers. The only reason he hadn’t frozen to death was his constant movement. Finally, finally, he’d heard the breakers crashing on shore and let the waves carry him in.

Ethan dragged himself further past the tideline, not daring to stand up yet. He tasted sand and rock and salt, felt it rubbing against his face. Land. It was heavenly. For a moment he just laid there, enjoying the feeling of stillness in his legs.

Within thirty seconds he was shaking with cold again. He could linger no longer.

With a groan, Ethan pulled himself into a kneel, grasping his injured arm to his chest. He looked around.

The moon had risen, casting everything with a pallid glow. He was on a long, narrow strip of sand dotted with boulders, run up against a tall craggy cliff. He saw no lights down the beach or beyond the waves, nor an obvious trail up the cliff face. In other words, he was totally screwed. At least he was still in field clothes, the basic black T-shirt and lightweight pants that would let him blend into the darkness. He wished for his jacket, but he’d shucked it, along his shoes and socks, after the crash to give him more mobility in the water. 

Ethan pinched his own arm, struggling to focus. His frigid mind was sluggish, but he knew what he had to do: get shelter and fire. Without the warmth of movement he would not last long if he didn’t dry off.

He rose carefully, his legs wobbly but viable. He started making his way toward the boulders at the edge of the cliff. After several minutes of seeking, he found not even a shallow cave or hollow. He couldn’t light a fire without some way of concealing it, lest the people in the helicopter were still looking for him. He couldn’t stay here, either.

He eyed the cliff again. It had looked sheer in the moonlight before, but closer to it he saw it was not as steep as he’d feared. He ran his hands along the base, testing the rock. The material felt trustworthy, climbable. He looked up to where the moon-washed stars were blocked by the lip of the crag. Eighty feet or so, by his reckoning.

Ethan groaned again. It was going to be a long night.

He gently stretched out his right arm. Ethan used to rock climb in his free time; he tried to still when he got the chance. But it had been a while, and though he was confident in his strength, he’d never had to scale an unfamiliar rock face in the near dark, half-frozen with his shoulder badly relocated. Well, guess there’s a first time for everything.

The long, shallow cut on his forearm had stopped bleeding a while back. Ethan pulled out his knife, cut a narrow strip of cloth from the bottom of his pants leg and bound the wound in case it started seeping again as he ascended.

He peered critically at the cliff face, looking for a way up. Something that looked like a route wound its way up. Really, it was all he had to go on. Ethan took a breath, gripped the stone, and started climbing.

Immediately his shoulder protested the movement . Ripples of pain spread down along his right side. Ethan gritted his teeth and tried to shift more of his weight to his left leg and arm. He climbed on.

There was a powerful breeze coming off the ocean, chilling his still-wet skin and clothes even more and whipping his hair into his face. Waves shattered noisily on the rocks below him, an ominous reminder of what he had to look forward to should he fall.

But he felt relatively okay. Despite his condition, he was making good time. The cliff was pitted and sound, and handholds and footholds were far apart but definitely there. As he rose, his fingers and toes warmed. Slowly but steadily, he made his way up.

Ten feet…twenty feet. His fingers ached, and his breath came in short bursts.

After about ten minutes it was clear the ascension would not continue to go so well. The cliff started smoothing inexplicably, and Ethan’s arms and legs were shaking with exertion. He paused at one point, catching his breath, pressing his forehead against the rock. Tears of pain leaked out the corner of his eyes, his shoulder feeling like molten lead had replaced his muscles. He looked down at the beach and saw with a surge of despair he was barely a quarter of the way up. He was already running on empty.

He was stranded on the coast of England in winter, injured, freezing, with no way of contacting the IMF or his friends, and some new assailants looking for him and shooting to kill. Even for Ethan, who was used to difficult, even impossible situations–hell, it was in the job description– this was bad. He shuddered against the cliff, exhausted.

For some reason, it was only at that moment that he realized his team probably thought he was dead.

The revelation was enough to almost knock him off the cliff face. He clung on, feeling sick.

They had no way of knowing he was alive. The explosion had obliterated everyone inside the plane. He’d gotten lucky, nothing more. But water holds no tracks, and when the wreckage was found, and any bodies left merely charred, unrecognizable bones, Brandt, Jane and Benji would assume the worst. Ethan knew what would happen. They’d hold out hope for a while, confident that no matter the circumstances, Ethan would pull a solution out of his ass just like he’d always done. But after a while, when it looked like this time he really was gone, that hope would decay, and calcify in their hearts, and sit there like a broken bone that healed wrong, constantly stabbing, constantly reminding them of who hadn’t come home until time eventually wore it away. After Prague in ’96, when almost his entire team was murdered by his turncoat mentor, Ethan knew that pain. It had been years until the rotten, hollow grief from it had scarred over.

Ethan snarled. He would get home, he swore to himself, suddenly angry. He wouldn’t let them grieve, wouldn’t let their hope die. He would get home.

He peeled himself away and kept climbing.

By the time Ethan reached the last quarter of the climb his whole body was shaking, his fingers scraped and slippery with blood, and his right shoulder was almost numb with pain. He paused again, swallowing a moan. His head swam. The waves were faint on the rocks below; he was near the top. He risked a glance up and saw the end of this hellish ascent barely twenty feet up. He pressed his face to the cool rock again, panting.

Come on, Ethan. You’re an IMF agent. You love heights. You’ve done far worse than this. You geckoed your way up the Burj Khalifa, for God’s sake!

He pushed off and kept going. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten. Five.

Ethan felt turf under his fingers. He kicked off the cliff and hauled himself up, his shoulder screaming. With a final gasp of agony he clambered over the edge and collapsed onto horizontal ground.

His vision went dark.

()()()()()

Duh-duh. Duh-duh. Duh-duh.

There was a pounding in his ears, pulling him from the warmth of sleep. Ethan muttered in protest. Had he fallen asleep in the locker room again, and Benji had brought in another basketball and was hurling it against the wall like last time to wake him up?

“Screw off, Benji…” he mumbled.

Wait…what was that taste in his mouth? Was that…grass?

And as reality slowly simpered back to him Ethan found it wasn’t a basketball that was making that noise. It was his own heartbeat, thudding inside his head.

Wind tugged at his hair and iced the exposed parts of his skin, and all of a sudden the pain of his injuries rushed back to him. He gasped and arched up, blinking.

England. He was somewhere in England. His plane had blown up, and there were people coming after him.

The adrenaline of this realization was enough to wake him up fully. Ethan coughed and rose to all fours, tenderly minding his right shoulder and arm. He was at the top of the cliff. Far below the ocean murmured over the beach, and the moon was now nearing the horizon. Ethan wagered he only had a few hours of darkness left. He had to use them.

He hadn’t been unconscious long. Any longer and he wouldn’t have woken up. In fact, he wasn’t sure why he had. He slowly leaned back onto his knees and lifted his head.

Ethan froze. He was not alone.

Reflecting the cold light of the moon, two eyes gleamed in the darkness before him. 

Only his IMF training, burned into his bones from years of experience, kept him from reeling back with a yelp of surprise. He stayed completely still. Two round eyes glowed not five feet away from him. In the strong light of the full moon, they were an eerie red.

Ethan’s arms and neck prickled with goosebumps. He’d seen far scarier, but there was some animal fear in him that automatically kicked upon beholding red eyes at night. He suddenly thought of the Hound of the Baskervilles, that Sherlock Holmes story about the monstrous hound that roamed the moors at night. He was somewhere on the west coast of England, alone, and here was something with red eyes crouching in the darkness, looking at him, and holyshitI’mgonnadierighthere–

Knock it off, Ethan. His brain kicked in and the fear kicked out. The eyes were small and not far apart, about a foot and a half off the ground, not nearly tall enough for a mythical hound. What real animals had red eyeshine? He racked his brain. Rabbits, many owls, and–

He couldn’t help it. He barked a laugh. The eyes wavered in surprise.

He knew it was risky, but Ethan pulled out the tiny Maglite he kept in his pants pocket and twisted it on. A yellow glow erupted from his hands, making his eyes throb and illuminating the fox sitting on the turf in front of him.

The fox narrowed its eyes in response to the light, but did not run away. It was sitting on its haunches, bushy tail pulled around its left leg, triangular ears sticking straight up. Its entire pelt was a fine reddish silver, edged with black. Ethan stayed still, not wanting to scare it.

The fox did not look away from him. Its eyes still flicked red in his flashlight, but there was no glaze over them or foam at the mouth of rabies. Ethan sat back. What was wrong with this fox? Wild animals don’t just walk up to people.

For a moment the two just sat still, not taking their eyes off one another. So this was what had woken him up; the presence of another creature nearby.

Suddenly, the fox snarled, its teeth gleaming. Ethan started, shutting off his light. His eyes ached as they adjusted to the darkness again.

The fox’s red eyes lowered to the ground and Ethan knew it was standing up now, head to the ground. A low growl came from it.

Ethan put his hands in front of him, waiting for the animal to pounce.

The fox suddenly silenced, but there was a new sound coming over the moor, a sound that made Ethan’s stomach turn to ice. He dropped to the turf as headlights cut through the darkness in front of him. 

Shit. Just…shit. Could this night get any worse? Ethan scowled. He’d forgotten: it could always get worse.

A black SUV came into view and stopped about half a mile distant. He couldn’t make out any distinguishing marks, but he could see all to clearly the dozen black figures that poured out of the car. Even from here, he could see the moonlight catch on the barrels of their guns. No flashlights were needed; they could see all they needed in the moonlight. They spread out in a wide phalanx, advancing toward the cliff and toward Ethan. If he stood, if he ran, they would see him.

He was trapped.


	4. Coffee Talk

_Coffee….mmm. I smell coffee….must go to the coffee…._

Jane opened her eyes to the rich aroma wafting through the living room. She’d know that scent anywhere. There were some days after missions that coffee was her only motivation to move, much less get out bed.

Then two things flashed through her mind.

One, she was at the meeting house, the little place near Langley where the team often met to plan missions and, sometimes, get totally smashed and run an Indiana Jones marathon. She recognized the lumpy secondhand couch beneath her, the scent of Doritos and laughter permanently soaked into the material. She also knew where she was because a), someone not herself was making coffee, and b), since she had absolutely no social life whatsoever outside of the IMF (except that one-night stand last year and inviting her friend Gabriella up from Culpeper every now and again), the only people doing so would be Benji, Ethan or Brandt– 

Ethan. The plane. Dead– no, missing.

Brandt, slumped against the side of a building.

Jane sat bolt upright as the events of last night came avalanching down on her. She looked frantically over to the couch adjacent to hers, where they’d put Brandt last night. The sheets were rumpled, the multiple blankets pushed to the end, and its occupant nowhere to be seen. She looked down to see Benji still asleep on the floor, and her anxiety eased somewhat. She threw off her own blankets and swung off the couch, her bare feet cold on the floor. Pulling a fleece over her T-shirt and PJ pants to ward off the winter chill, she followed the scent that had roused her.

The meeting house was actually an apartment, with a small bedroom, a living room, bathroom, and kitchen. It was under Ethan’s name; it had remained unused while he was in prison. After Cobalt, the four of them started gathering there so frequently that Jane kinda forgot it was in reality Ethan’s only home. It just felt so right for them to all crash there, and Jane secretly believed Ethan loved not being there alone.

Jane winced. It had felt right. Now without their leader the place seemed empty. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best idea to come here, but Jane had always trusted her instinct. This was the closest thing they had to home. When they’d hauled Brandt into the car last night, she hadn’t known where else to go.

Speaking of which…

Jane padded into the kitchen to find him leaning against the counter, waiting as the coffee dripped into the carafe. She stopped.

Brandt still looked terrible, and he wasn’t even hypothermic anymore. His face was paler than normal, throwing the bruising around his right eye from the previous op into sharp relief. His blue eyes were bloodshot and short hair mussed from sleep. He was still wearing the black sweat pants and large gray sweater Jane and Benji had wrestled his comatose form into last night, and his shoulders were slumped from exhaustion. His head was down, back to the counter, cold-burned hands on the edge. He seemed to exude defeat.

Seeing him now made any anger from yesterday drain out of Jane. She had already forgiven him, even before they’d found him, but it was so unlike Brandt to back down at all that seeing him last night and now this morning was pretty shocking, and killed whatever residual resentment was left in her system. Brandt had always been the pessimist of them, the realist, helping check Ethan’s single-minded recklessness at time, acknowledging the obstacles ahead but never giving in to them. But he hid things, like all of them, and soon Jane learned the ex-analyst had a sensitive streak the size of Indiana. She felt her face soften.

“Knock, knock,” she said quietly.

Brandt’s head snapped up. “Jane,” he said, his voice hoarse. For a second he looked panicked, like he expected her to start reaming him. “I…”

“…Have coffee,” Jane finished for him. “Excellent. Move over.”

She went over to the cabinets, chose a pair of mugs, and placed them on the counter next to the coffeemaker. Brandt took the cue and pulled the half-and-half from the fridge. Jane took it and poured a little into the bottom of one of the mugs for herself, knowing Brandt took his black.

They went through the motions, Jane sensing Brandt’s total awkwardness and apprehension, and completely ignoring it. There were some things men just didn’t understand, Jane had decided. Coffee first, painful conversations second. It was a basic law of nature that heavy subjects of any kind were improved by a warm beverage.

Jane shoved a mug into Brandt’s cold hands once she’d filled it. “Here.”

Brandt wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Thanks.” He sipped the steaming liquid gently.

A pause.

Brandt took a sharp breath, then released it. “Jane–“

“Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted. Brandt opened his mouth to protest, but Jane ran on. “We were both in shock and grieving and we took it out on each other. I’m sorry too.”

Brandt looked at her. His face was miserable.

Jane scowled. “Don’t do that thing you do. I know you’ll just feel guilty about this for the rest of the week, and we have bigger things to worry about. So don’t.”

“But the things I said–“

“We both said some assholey stuff,” said Jane. On an impulse she moved closer and leaned into Brandt, putting her arm around his waist and resting her head on his burly shoulder. She felt him tense momentarily, then relax at the contact. “We’re both sorry, it happened, let’s just leave it there, okay?”

Brandt was still. Then slowly he nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Jane rubbed his back, then went back to holding her mug, feeling the warmth glow into her hands. “How do you feel?”

Brandt took another sip. “Honestly? Like I went a few rounds with the Abominable Snowman–and lost.”

Jane chuckled. “You look it too.”

Brandt rubbed his eyes. “What the hell happened last night, Jane? I just remember running and…” he covered his face with his hand, wincing. “You guys came and got me.”

“Yeah,” Jane said, quieter. “For some reason you decided it was a good idea to sit outside in twenty-five degree weather in a T-shirt and jeans for God knows how long.”

“The last thing I remember was you getting me into the car…” Brandt took his hand from his face and laid it back on the counter. “After that, nothing.”

Jane nodded, blowing on her coffee to cool it. She kept her eyes down. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “This place was closest, and I figured you’d want to wake up somewhere familiar. You were hypothermic, and by the time we got you here, unconscious. Benji and I got you changed and packed you in with hot water bottles and blankets and whatever else we had. After checking to make sure you weren’t critical, of course.” She brushed the events of the night off lightly, but in truth she had been scared. Seeing Brandt, who was usually so reserved and collected, come unhinged enough to silence his judgment…it rattled her pretty deeply. It didn’t help that the guy passed out in her arms from cold and shock minutes later.

“Why….” Brandt’s jaw worked. “Why did you even come looking for me?”

Jane rolled her eyes. “We were worried about you, moron.”

“But you left, and Benji was headed for the bar. What changed your minds?”

Jane sighed. “After I left you at the base, I drove outside of the city for a while. I needed time, just to…you know. Be quiet. Collect my thoughts. When I started back toward my apartment, I remembered I’d left a clothes bag in my locker at Langley, and since we’re going on leave I wanted to have it. I went inside and found your gear on the bench, with your keys and phone still inside. By then it was dark, and I was just slightly less pissed off at you–“ a ghost of a smirk appeared on Brandt’s face– “ and I started to worry. I knew your car and apartment key is on your key ring, and the mental state I left you in…well… ” Jane let the sentence finish itself, even as she felt Brandt grimace next to her. She knew him, and he knew she did. Brandt was tough, but he had his scars which opened up every now and again, and when they did, he was vulnerable. Fatigue, grief, guilt, despair, loneliness… for Brandt, the combination could be dangerous. When she found the keys, along with Brandt’s good winter jacket he’d worn in to work this morning, she saw the scenario play out in her head. He’d end up locked out of his home, if he even got that far, freezing and too exhausted or dug in to himself to care.

“So I called Benji,” she continued. “He was at the bar, but he hadn’t actually had anything yet. I told him what I’d found. He agreed you were probably in trouble. He left his car at the bar and we came straight here.”

Brandt raised an eyebrow slightly. “How do you know where I live? You’ve never been over to my place.”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “This is Benji we’re talking about, Brandt. Have you ever seen the guy without his laptop? He searched you at the bar, we got an address and we came and got you. You know the rest.”

“How did he– actually, nevermind. It’ll just creep me out.” Brandt shifted against the counter. “Thanks,” he murmured. “For picking me up. I’m sorry I acted like such an idiot. I don’t know what came over me, Jane. It was like I couldn’t escape myself no matter how fast I ran.”

“Of course we came,” she answered calmly. “It’s our job. And we’re only human, Brandt. We’re all entitled to our little shatterings.” She pushed away the could-have-beens– if she hadn’t forgotten her gym bag, put the pieces together and gotten instead another report from the Secretary the next morning of the death of a team member, this one much closer to home.

For a moment after they just stood in silent camaraderie, draining the last of their mugs and letting the dust settle once again. That was how they worked on this team. If they couldn’t forgive, they would never get home.

“So what are your plans?” asked Brandt after a time. “For this week, I mean.”

Jane shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “I don’t know.” She turned and placed her empty mug in the sink. “I hadn’t really though that far ahead.” Lie. She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost nine. Benji told me not to let him sleep in.”

Jane went back into the living room. Benji was still sacked out on his bedroll on the floor. He’d told Jane to take the second couch last night because a) she was better with Brandt when he was in one of his moods and she’d hear him if he woke up, and b) Benji talked, quite loudly, in his sleep. Before he’d passed out last night he’d told Jane to get him up if Brandt came to.

She smirked at her techie where he slept, blond hair mussed, one arm tossed over his head, mouth open. She picked up a pillow from her couch and tossed it onto his face, knowing impact was the most effective way of waking Benji up when they weren’t on duty. The guy slept like a rock.

The pillow made landfall, and Benji muttered irritably. “Mmm…wha’ timesit?”

“Five of nine,” said Jane. “Get up. We have work to do.”

Benji sat up, rubbing his face. “Work? Why?”

Jane grimaced and looked back to Brandt. She could tell by the set of his face he had already guessed what she was about to say. “Because we’re going to find the people who went after Ethan–before they come after us first.”

( )()()()()

“I still don’t understand,” protested Benji as he shoved clothes into a duffel bag. “What makes you think we’ve been targeted again?”

“Think about it, Benji,” said Brandt. “We’ve been a team with Ethan now for how long?” He held up a fake ID from where he was sorting passports on the kitchen table. “Do I have to be Richard Cranium this time?”

Jane snorted from the laptop. “I’ll leave that up to you.” She clicked, booking their flight to England for that evening. Amazing how far a little government clearance could get you in the airline industry. They were flying civilian lines this time; they all agreed to avoid jets for a while. “Benji, Ethan was the only agent of any experience on that plane. You saw it yourself when you hacked into the report; the other two guys were brand new. There was only one target and you know it.” She closed the laptop.

“But what does that have to do with us?” asked Benji. “I mean, yeah, we’re a team, but Ethan was an agent long before we came along to join him. This could have been anyone, someone from his past maybe.”

“Yeah,” said Brandt, “or, it could have been someone new, someone we don’t know. Don’t you think that if someone wanted to bump off Ethan Hunt they’d choose a more failsafe way then blowing up the plane he’s on?”

Benji looked put out. “That sounds pretty failsafe to me. Flames, falling, explosions–”

“Look, the point is we’re probably on the list too,” interrupted Jane. She shoved the laptop into its sleeve and handed it back to Benji. “This is the first mission in nearly a year Ethan’s done without us. Whoever wanted him dead knew he would be on that plane, knew his schedule.” Jane raised her eyebrows at Benji. “Which means, if they knew Ethan’s itinerary, they know ours too. Therefore, we are at risk. And we can’t just wait around here to be hit as well.”

Benji nodded slowly. He pulled a med kit out of the cabinet and tossed it onto his duffel. “Okay. And we’re not telling the IMF any of this…why?”

Brandt stood and tossed a passport to each of them. “Whoever bombed Ethan’s jet had to have a contact on the inside to know the details of the return trip. Since we don’t know who that is–“

“We can’t trust anyone,” grumbled Benji. “Which means, of course, no backup, no intel, no extraction, no help from the agency at all. Peachy. Just one more question, why are we going to England again? Not that I’m complaining of course.”

Brandt and Jane exchanged a look. Jane had questioned the wisdom of their decision, but they couldn’t stay here either. “Ethan’s last mission was in London,” said Jane. “From what we hacked, it had to do with smashing an arms dealing ring. If Ethan pissed someone off and we’re going to find out anything about it, we may as well start where he left off.”

“If we get that far,” murmured Brandt. “Personally I don’t think we will.”

Jane scowled. “What do you mean?”

Brandt held up his hands. “I’m not trying to be negative. What I mean is that one of two things is gonna happen. Option a, we get to London, dig around, and find nothing. It’s possible, but judging by how serious these guys have come off as, not very probable. Option b, and what I feel is more likely considering the evidence, we get to London and all hell breaks loose, as it seems to consistently do for us. Whoever wanted to kill Ethan is gonna want to kill us too, if they don’t already.”

Benji sat down heavily on one of the kitchen stools. “Do you really think we’ve been targeted?” he asked quietly.

Jane leaned against the counter. “Yes. And if we have, our week is about to get a lot more stressful.”

Brandt hooked his thumbs in the pocket of his sweatpants. “There’s another thing. These guys are bombers. They have insiders. I mean, maybe we’re not on the hit list, but when we go to London and look for these guys we will be. This is going to be our most isolated mission since Ghost Protocol, and that time we knew what we were up against.” Brandt looked at Benji and Jane. “If either of you want to back out now and not go after this…if I’m not too bold in saying it, I think Ethan would understand. I do.”

Jane shook her head. “You know I’m in. I’d rather be going out to face the threat than wait for it to come to me.”

They both looked to Benji.

The Brit raised his eyebrows. “Are you kidding? One, we’re going to the UK, and I’m from England. I did my initial training in London. You’re gonna need me over there. And two, if you think you’re just going to take off without me you’re wrong. I have no life anyway, what will I do with this week if you two aren’t here? I’d much rather go and try to take down a shadow group of possible terrorists, for sure. No, I’m coming with you, obviously.” He nodded sharply.

Brandt nodded as well. “Okay.” He kept nodding slowly, eyes distant.

The three were silent. It was just another mission, Jane reminded herself. Just another mission, only this one was the first in a long time they would be doing without their leader.

“You forgot option C,” Benji said at length. Jane and Brandt looked up at him.

The techie’s eyes were bright with a sudden defiance. “Option C, Brandt. We go, we find Ethan and we get him the hell out of there and worry about the assholes who tried to kill him later. I’ll take that one, thank you.”

Jane smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll take C too. Let’s go get Ethan and bring him home.” She pushed down the nagging thoughts in the bottom of her mind, whispering to her of despair.

If he’s still alive. If, by the time we get there, there’s anything left to save. 


	5. Resolution

So it was gonna be one of those missions, was it?

Though, Ethan thought as he lay motionless on the ground, freezing and in pain and seconds away from being shot, this didn’t really count as a mission, now did it? Normally he got paid to do shit like this. This time the only incentive in sight was preservation of life and limb, which, granted, was an effective incentive, but didn’t do much for paying the bills. 

Still, it seemed the planets had aligned to make his near future as deplorable as possible.

Ethan clung to the moor, the scent of turf rich in his nostrils. His eyes were closed but his ears, sensitive from years of being on guard, were on full alert. He heard the crunching footsteps of the gunmen drawing quickly nearer.

Ethan considered his options. There were only two ways out, one ending with certain death on the rocks below, the other with the slightly less certain death via bullet holes.

He breathed out, focusing. He tuned out the pain of his wounds, his shoulder and the burns on his back that were starting to sear again, channeling his power into mental stillness. He needed to be ready.

Crunch…crunch….

Five…four…one.

Benji. Jane. Brandt. Home.

Ethan exploded from the grass, silent as a pouncing cat.

He felt the cold of the gun barrel in his hands as his momentum bore his opponent down with a surprised shout.

Ethan punched him in the throat, sharp and harsh. He felt the man’s windpipe collapse. He thrashed for a moment and then started to go still, the call dying. 

“Hey, Ronson? You fallin’ asleep on the job again, you lazy prat?” called out one of the gunmen to his left.

Good. They hadn’t seen him yet.

The gunman on the ground was wearing a ski mask. Ethan tore it off his face, slipped it over his own, and grabbed the AK-47 out of the man’s locked arms. He stood, stumbling slightly. “Oh, yeah, sorry,” he replied, slipping into a British accent to match theirs. “I’m fine, boys. Tripped on a damn hillock.” He fell into line with the others, slowly advancing toward the cliff. Luckily the man whose identity he’d assumed had been in toward the back of the jagged phalanx. They wouldn’t find him until they circled back around, and Ethan would be long gone by then. 

“Well, keep going toward the cliff,” said the one who’d called out; likely the leader. “If he survived the swim, he hit the beach around here, if the current maps are anything to go by. Keep your eyes open and your yips shut. This bloke is dangerous, according to the bosses.”

“What makes the bosses think he even made is this far?” piped up one of the others.

“Murphy, are selectively deaf or some shit? Did I not just say to shut it?” growled the leader.

“I just think it’s fair to know who we’re up against, Andrews,” Murphy petulantly replied. “Is this guy an assassin, a merc or what?”

“It is not our job to know who he is,” shot back Andrews. “Our job is to find the guy and get rid of him, no questions asked. That’s what we’re being paid for, you dense idiot. All I know is that he’s dangerous and that we were told to take no chances. Shoot on sight, you got that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” muttered Murphy. The group fell into silence again.

Ah. That answered a few questions. Unfortunately, not the necessary ones. These guys were hitmen, mercenaries. Ethan doubted they even knew who the “Bosses” really were.

There was one thing made clear here, though. Whoever was after him knew him. Knew him well enough to bomb the jet he was flying on and still send a group of guns-for-hire to finish the job.

This was no random hit from amateur terrorists or angry arms dealers. These guys were serious.

It was time to disappear.

Ethan slipped back further from the rest of the group, stepping lightly on the springy turf. He glanced at the sky and relief flooded him. It seemed that despite his problems with people this past week, nature was giving him a break.

He waited patiently, slowing down more and more.

He was running out of time. The head of the phalanx was almost to the cliff. They wouldn’t freeclimb down in the dark unless they were extremely experienced, and he saw no grappling lines on them. Which meant he only had a few seconds before they turned around, started back and discovered the ruse.

C’mon….

Just as the head of the group stopped at the edge of the cliff, the dense clouds overhead, pushed coastward by the ocean breeze, rolled over the full moon and cast the moor into almost total shadow.

Without a sound, Ethan turned. And ran. 

He held onto the gun. He would need it. Every other part of his body was a blur of motion. His stride stretched out, his arms pumped despite the pain. The ground seemed to push up beneath him, sending him flying forward.

He could still see the SUV, a blob of darker blackness in the washed-out shade over the moor. He made for it, bracing for the sound of shots and shouts behind him, for the bullets sure to come.

Five hundred yards…three hundred…

Ethan hurtled over the moor faster than he thought he could at this point. Adrenaline tuned out the pain and fatigue, reduced him to the animal impulse. Move. 

A hundred yards…

Crack!

“No, don’t just run after him, shoot at him, dammit!”

So they’d found the body of the unfortunate Ronson.

Ethan scraped for more speed as bullets bit into the ground around him. One came close enough to catch on the edge of his shirt, ripping it. He ducked and kept running. He didn’t have time to try and evade. His only hope was the car.

He reached the SUV and whirled behind the back of it, taking cover on the other side. Bullets hammered into the far flank. Ethan crouched behind a wheel, catching his breath.

The forward door on his side opened and a black-masked man with a pistol leaned out to shoot. Ethan swung the AK-47 up and fired. The man was dead before he fell onto the ground.

Now. He had to go now.

He sprang up, still crouching, and clambered into the driver’s seat. That’s right, he was in the UK, so everything was backwards by American standards, including which side the damn steering wheel was on. God, he was so done with this place.

He checked the passenger side and backseat, but both were thankfully empty.

Glass shattered and metal pinged. Ethan snarled and hunkered down as reams of bullets continued to tear into the side of the car.

He risked a glance up and saw that the moon had come out again, drenching the moor with light. The mercenaries were less than a hundred yards away and closing fast. He had to get out of here.

Ethan fumbled for the key, found it, and turned. The engine thrummed to life.

The mercenaries shouted, not in anger now, but alarm.

Still ducking, Ethan grabbed the wheel and pressed the gas. The SUV surged forward. The mercenaries were still howling when he took off over the moor and let the shadows swallow him again.

()()()()

The sound of his heartbeat in his ears was back, keeping time with the throbbing of his shoulder and back. Ethan sat up carefully, pulling the mask off and tossing it in the front seat. He was out of immediate danger, but there was still a big problem he had to address:

Where in the hell was he?

The headlights were still on. He wanted to shut them off, but he didn’t know this area, and he’d had enough of cliffs for one night. He’d rather take his chances with his pursuers than risk driving off an edge he could not see.

He was on a road; he knew that much. It was narrow and old and unmarked for all he could see, but it was a road, and right now that was enough for him.

A lunar glow caught Ethan’s eye– the SUV’s GPS system, showing his location. Well, at least now he knew where he was. Apparently even bands of mercenaries need directions to places as remote as this.

According to the console, he was near Exmoor National Park, and the road he was on eventually connected with a larger route called A39. He tapped the screen and it zoomed out. A39 led eventually to the town of Porlock.

Good. A town was what he needed. A place to hide, gather supplies, ditch the car, and maybe even sleep.

Ethan tapped the screen again. It zoomed out further, showing a thin black line that meandered along the road he was following and joined A39. From there it led through Porlock and northeast toward Minehead.

Ethan touched the line. A little bubble popped up, labeling it in neat bolt font: YOUR ROUTE.

Despite himself, Ethan laughed. Bless the arrogance of large groups mercenaries. They never considered he’d try to steal their car. Now they’d left a nice little breadcrumb trail to their point of origin, where, if Ethan was really lucky, their employers were waiting for them.

But first things first. He was injured, freezing, and adrenaline-exhausted. He gripped the wheel tighter, a lifeline. He had to stay awake until he found somewhere safe.

Actually, who was he kidding. He was never safe.

Ethan drove for what felt like hours. The unnamed road became A39, wider and better maintained. He went for miles without seeing another car. As he drove, he started to pick apart the events of the day.

Who were these guys? These mysterious “Bosses” who had taken such a liking to the concept of his death. Were they part of the crime ring that he, Berns and Harvey had finished off this week? He thought back to the briefing the Secretary had given them. She’d told them to go in, join their collaborators in MI6, glean as much information they could, then hunt down everyone involved and hand them over to the British government. Ethan scowled. They’d done just that. The organization had been nuclear and small, a tight-knit group of budding terrorists with a vendetta against both America and the UK. Hence the joint mission with MI6. As far as they had all been able to find, the group hadn’t had any outside affiliation, and they’d arrested or killed everyone involved.

Unless they missed a big piece, it wasn’t the terrorist group coming after him. So whom did that leave? Ethan smirked despite himself. With his history, plenty.

He doubted it was someone who’d been connected with Hendricks. There are subtler ways to get rid of an agent, and why wait a year?

It could be an old enemy, but if so, Ethan had no idea who or how. He made a point to keep tabs on anyone who was involved with a target and walked free for precisely this reason. No, he doubted it was anyone he’d encountered in the past.

So someone new. Someone with some serious firepower too. Ethan thought over the afternoon again, trying to find themes, clues, anything that may indicate a name. He analyzed until his eyes blurred, but he couldn’t find anything. He had no idea who was hunting him.

Ethan sighed. He hoped he could find a public space in Porlock he could rest up until the sun rose, before he’d keep going. He’d have a few things to take care of first. His arm was still throbbing, and the burns on his back screamed against the seat. He would tend to his wounds once he reached somewhere safer. He thought too of the tracker under the skin of his upper arm, replaced there by the IMF after the Cobalt mission. Every deep cover agent had one. If was live as long as the heart was beating, and could be activated by the IMF to hone in on an agent’s location.

Ethan grimaced. Trackers were a last resort. The IMF activated them only when there was no other way, for two reasons: one, that it would broadcast his location only for a few hours, and two, it gave off a faint but distinct radiation that was easily detectible to even primitive scanning technology. Agents were trained to withhold their affiliation to the death in the event of a capture, but if their chip was turned on, their captor could just scan their arm and bingo.

He knew the IMF would normally wait forty-eight hours before turning to the chip once an agent disappeared. They should do the same for him.

Except….the explosion. They wouldn’t be looking for bodies. They’d be looking for bones. They would assume his death and not use the tracker at all. And even if Brandt, Jane and Benji were looking for him, they wouldn’t have access. The chip was useless now.

Ethan leaned his head back. So he didn’t have to cut the tracker out. That was convenient. He was in plenty of pain as it was.

Besides, he couldn’t go home yet even if they did know where he was. He glanced back down at the black line snaking its way across the GPS. A beacon. A focus. He had people to protect, a job to do.

These people had shot first. As far as Ethan was concerned, that meant war.

He felt his hope returning. Now, he had a target.


	6. Walter

For the first time in his life, Benji didn’t want to be in London.

Which was odd, because it was basically home. Though he’d been born in Manchester and his family still resided there, after middle school Benji had spent nearly all of his time in the capitol city. He’d hated high school up north, so after freshman year he’d transferred to London and lived with his uncle all the way to college before moving to America to complete his education, where his hacking skills were detected by the IMF. (Well, detected may be a bit generous. He’d rather put himself out there. No one could ever prove he’d broken into the CIA database that one time, but afterwards when black-suited officials showed up with a contract instead of handcuffs, he knew exactly why.) Though he lived in the US now, he visited his homeland anytime he could, and London was one of his favorite places to be.

But this time, as they touched down in Heathrow around midnight after a six-hour flight, all he could think about was Ethan’s last mission.

Was London the last city he ever saw? Would the same go for them?

Benji swallowed the lump in his throat and pushed away his worry. He stood, pulled his gearbag from the overhead compartment, and filed into the crowded aisle. He glanced back to see Brandt a few people behind him. The analyst caught his eye for a second and looked away just as quickly. For now, they did not know each other.

Customs and baggage claim went by in a familiar blur. The three of them met at the exit. Brandt was carrying the large duffle bag that contained their weapons; the clerk at the checked baggage area had blanched when he opened it after it failed to clear the x-ray machine, but after some badge-waving and a favor call to Luther it came through.

The three of them faced each other, the knowledge of what they had to do heavy among them.

“So what’s the plan?” asked Benji plainly. “I mean, we don’t really know what we’re up against here. Where are we looking to start?”

Brandt grimaced. “I’m not sure, honestly. Usually it’s Ethan coming up with the crazy ideas.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “You two are hopeless. Don’t you remember that the mission Ethan was on here was a collaboration with MI6? That’s where we start.”

“So what, we’re just going to waltz into the British Secret Service and ask them for the details?” asked Benji. “It doesn’t really work like that, Jane.”

A terrifying scowl appeared on Jane’s face. Benji swallowed. “Of course that’s not what I meant. No, we need to hack into the MI6 database and look for more details on that mission.” She hefted her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “But first we need a place to stay. We’re not going to get anything done tonight. Benji, do you know anywhere defendable? We don’t know who may be coming after us.”

Benji thought. “My Uncle Walter’s flat,” he decided. “Third floor, balcony, security cameras on the ground floor I could tap into. And my uncle was an agent himself back in the day. He won’t ask questions.”

“Perfect.” Brandt lifted his own bag. “Lead on, London man.”

A half hour and one ramped cab ride later and they reached the flat complex.

He hadn’t visited in over a year, and seeing it now made him feel surprisingly nostalgic. He could suddenly recall his memories of spending high school here, sharing dinner with his uncle at their small kitchen table, doing homework near the little window in his room that looked out over the road, sneaking onto the roof after midnight to look for stars that were not there. A lump rose in his throat.

“You two stay out here,” he said when they reached the stairs inside. “I’ll go up and explain things to him. Better if I do it.”

“Benji,” said Brandt, “are you sure this is a good idea? You said he was ex-service. Some of the retirees in our line of business don’t always take well to having the old days show up on their doorsteps, y’know?” Oh, Benji knew. Just look at Ethan a few years ago. One night he’s celebrating his engagement party, a week later his wife is kidnapped and he’s chained to a chair about to be interrogated by an internationally-dealing sociopath. It was too risky for most to even come close to the business after severing ties with it.

But his uncle wasn’t like that. He never had been. “Trust me,” said Benji. “He’ll be fine with it. I’ll be right back.” He dropped his bag and started going up the stairs two at a time.

He reached the second floor, then the third. The feeling of nostalgia increased. This was one of the few places he’d ever really called home. He’d figured out a long time ago that a home isn’t about the place as much as it’s about the people. He’d always felt out of place growing up in Manchester, though he was still relatively close to his parents and went up often to visit his sister. But somehow, this small, shambling flat in the upper end of London was the only place to which he’d ever really felt connected. 

He reached the door, number 313. He breathed out and knocked twice.

Ten seconds later, the door opened, and Benji found himself looking into blue eyes identical to his. For a moment he could not speak; he suddenly felt very young again as he stared at his uncle.

Walter looked the same as he ever did: steely hair sweeping back from his forehead, his face pale but healthy, his frame, leaner with age but just as powerful as it was in his agent days, cloaked in a T-shirt and worn flannel pants. His feet were bare, one a metal prosthesis, the only reminder of why Agent Walter Dunn, one of the best field hackers in the business, had been honorably discharged from MI6 at the age of thirty. But he still carried himself with the pride and dignity Benji had looked up to for years.

“Benji?” His uncle stepped out slightly. “What…?”

“Hi, Uncle Walter,” Benji finally said. “I…” All at once he had no idea what to say. He hadn’t seen his uncle in over a year, hadn’t written or called. “It’s really good to see you,” he finished lamely.

Walter smiled, that gentle, understanding smile that had always made Benji feel safe, and suddenly tears were spilling over his cheeks. The stress of the week, the loneliness and grief at having lost one of his only friends…in the presence of his uncle the dam holding at all back broke. Walter said nothing, just pulled his nephew into an embrace and let Benji sob it out.

A minute later, Benji’s bottled his emotions again, relieved that the gut-wrenching pain that had been clawing at his soul for the last two days had faded a little. He pulled back and wiped his eyes, but he didn’t feel embarrassed. He never had here. 

Walter handed him a handkerchief. “So, care to tell me what this is about, son?” he asked as Benji cleaned himself up with the kerchief.

He let out a shaky breath. “Yeah, sorry, just…” He grasped for words. Where to begin?

“Long week?” asked Walter. Benji nodded mutely. Even after more than a year apart and the fact that Benji wasn’t a teenager anymore, his uncle still read him like an open book. He saw his eyes darken as he took in the bags under Benji’s eyes, the slump in his shoulders.

“Are you in trouble?” Walter asked lowly. Benji knew what he really meant: Are you being followed? Is someone coming?

“Not yet,” said Benji. “But I think I will be soon.” He looked up into Walter’s eyes; the retiree still had a few inches on him. “I need a place to stay, Uncle… but….” Benji bit his lip.

Walter’s face opened in understanding. “I see. You’re not just here to visit, are you?”

Benji looked down. “No.”

Walter’s brow furrowed. “Is it sanctioned?”

“Not exactly.” Benji bit his lip again. “Call it an independent mission. I understand if you don’t want to get involved.”

Walter ‘s eyes took on a glint. “Don’t forget who you’re talking to, sprout. Go and get your agent friends. I’ll make tea, and then you had better inform me of the details.”

Benji felt the grin stretch over his face even as he turned to hurry back down the stairwell. A thought stopped him. “How did you know about my friends, Uncle?”

The retired hacker barked a laugh as he went back inside. “Benji. I’m insulted, dear boy. Do you really think I wouldn’t have my own tap on the security feed in this pile?” He laughed again and closed the door.

Warmth spread through Benji’s chest. His uncle hadn’t changed at all.

()()()() 

“A bomb?” asked Walter. “And what makes you all so sure your friend survived?”

The four were sitting at the miniscule kitchen table, its shaky legs threatening to collapse under the weight of Brandt and Benji’s elbows, Jane’s hands, and four mugs and the teapot that was just as voluminous as Benji remembered. The sweet aroma of Earl Grey and honey curled through the darkened kitchen as the three agents told Walter what had happened.

Jane took a careful sip. “So far, no bodies have been recovered.”

Walter raised a pale eyebrow. “And yet there was almost nothing left of the plane. Forgive my bluntness, but I don’t understand why you think he made it out of there. ”

Benji grimaced. Like they hadn’t thought of this already. “Uncle, you’re going to have to take our word on this one, I’m afraid. Ethan Hunt…” How could he even describe Ethan? You ever watch Batman, Uncle Walter?

“He’s a singularly gifted agent,” Brandt picked up. “He’s come out of situations so statistically fatal I’m beginning to think he’s immortal. If anyone could survive a fiery plane crash into the ocean, it’s Ethan.”

“Mr. Dunn,” Jane said. “He took down Owen Davian six years ago. Even retired as you are, I’m sure you heard about that.”

Recognition dawned on Walter’s lean face. “Ah. I see. Your friend Ethan’s reputation proceeds him. I do remember hearing from a friend of mine about a certain IMF operative bringing down Davian in Shanghai.” Walter scoffed a grin. “I hope I get to meet this man. I went a few rounds with that bastard Davian myself right when he was starting–independently of course. He was a powerful man, and a truly evil one. Anyone who could best him has garnered my respect.” Walter took a long draught of his tea before looking up at each of them. “And you think your friend Mr. Hunt was targeted. With his history, I could certainly understand why. But do you have any idea by whom?”

Benji shook his head. “None. We came to London for answers.”

“We’re thinking whoever did it will come to us,” Brandt continued. “We’ve been working with Ethan for over a year. If someone’s gunning for him, it’s reasonable to assume they’ll be after us next. We’re hoping to figure who they are and get one step ahead before they reach us.” He rubbed a hand over his crew cut, his blue eyes dark with worry and thought.

“Well, you did the right thing by coming here, Benji,” Walter said as he rose and collected the now-empty mugs and placed them in the sink. Benji stood automatically and brought the teapot over to the counter, falling into a familiar formation beside his uncle. He started washing the dishes as Walter returned to his seat. “I’ve got a live feed running in my study day and night of the security cameras on each floor. We’ll take shifts through tonight and monitor them. If anyone undesirable shows up, we’ll know.”

“Is there any way off this floor besides the stairwell?” asked Jane.

Benji could hear the wry glee in Walter’s voice. “As I’m sure you know, Miss Carter, one of two things happens to a retiree agent. One, you drink yourself to death, or two, you end up making your neighbors wonder if you’re utterly, madly paranoid. Leave those dishes, Benji. I want to give you all the grand tour.”

Walter led them through the apartment. Benji found himself not even needing to think about where his feet were falling. His muscles remembered every inch of this place, every turn in the hallways, the placement of every door and room. He followed up Jane and Brandt, his fingers trailing absently on the walls, still dotted here and there with photos of Benji’s mother or of a younger Benji himself, mostly with his sister or Walter. Benji peered at his rounded, acne-ridden face in one and couldn’t help grinning. It was incredible what fifteen years could change about someone.

Walter paused in the middle of the hallway. The agents gathered around as he reached up and pulled down an attic ladder. “I had this installed after the Kremlin was bombed last year. Which, yes, I know you four had something to do with,” Walter stated over Benji’s protests. “Either way, I needed a faster way out. Climb that ladder, stand up and you’ll find a double-trapdoor straight onto the roof. And if I, an old man, can find my way down from there, I’m sure you spry young things shall be able to do the same.” He yanked the cord, and the pseudo-attic closed. “There’s also an armory down here,” he said, leading them further down the hall, toward where Benji’s room was. He opened a linen closet and flicked on the light.

Benji stared. Walter had been holding out on him. The closet walls were lined with at least two dozen guns of various size and power. Boxes of ammunition were stacked on the small shelves. Padded tubs of grenades covered the floor. A small metal tin amongst the ammo boxes caught Benji’s eye. He leaned forward and opened it to find a pile of fake IDs, along with Walter’s passport and thick wads of hundred-pound notes and hundred-dollar bills.

Brandt blew out a breath. “Once an agent, always an agent, I suppose,” he said, a note of awe in his voice. “You have quite the ditch kit, Mr. Dunn.”

“Well, you never know what might happen,” said Walter. He clicked off the light and shut the door. “I wish I had a bunker, but no such luck. The super did not take kindly to my proposal of digging under the building.” The agents chuckled.

“It’s late,” he continued, turning to Brandt and Jane. “Why don’t you two get some sleep. Benji and I will take the first watch on the cameras. If anyone shows up down below we don’t like the look of, we’ll wake you. Sleep with your clothes on in case we need to bail out in a timely fashion.”

“Thank you again, Mr. Dunn,” said Jane sincerely. “We really appreciate this. We know how much you’re risking by helping us.”

“’Oh, please, call me Walter,” said Benji’s uncle. A gleam came into his eye. “And you said it, Mr. Brandt. ‘Once an agent, always an agent.’ Those guns have been collecting dust for far too long. It’s about time we had a little excitement around here.” Benji couldn’t help but grin.

“You can take Benji’s old room; there are twin beds in there. Last door on the left. We’ll wake you at four. When it’s light we can start looking for those answers of yours.” Brandt and Jane nodded their thanks again and went down the hallway, their exhaustion clear to Benji in their slumped shoulders and tired walks.

“They have good hearts, those two,” Walter said as they made their way back to the study. “You all do. I’ve never seen a team so dedicated. You watch one another’s backs. It’s good to see.”

Benji rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, hunting down a nuclear criminal and seeing New York be almost completely annihilated tends to bring people together.”

“And Ethan is your leader?” asked Walter.

Benji nodded. “He’s by far the most experienced of us. And he’s good at it. Calm, y’know?”

“I do know,” said Walter. “My leader was much the same.” He opened the door to the study. Blue light flooded Benji’s eyes, and he squinted momentarily before the room came into focus. The study was smallish, just a side room that had probably been a large closet once. Three long desks had been shoved together to make a c-shaped ring with a space in the middle for a chair to roll around in, and four separate computers of varying age and model were open on the desks. Each projected two frames of CCTV feed, covering different points of the apartment complex. Benji immediately identified the stairwell where he’d told Benji and Jane to wait. He smiled to himself. Walter knew everything.

Walter sat down in the rolling chair in the middle with a long sigh. Taking the hint, Benji fetched a chair from the kitchen, dragged it in, and sat down next to his uncle. He leaned back comfortably, eyes scanning over the screens.

“So,” said Walter after a time. “How’s it been this past year?”

Benji sighed. “It’s been rough,” he admitted. “Rougher than I thought I could handle. After the Cobalt mission especially.”

“Nightmares?”

Benji nodded. “I didn’t really sleep for about a month. It got better, but…”

“Still hard to swallow,” Walter finished. His uncle sounded thoughtful. “Y’know, after ’81, I didn’t sleep at all. I didn’t do much of anything, really. Just stared at the wall half the time. You know who got me out of it?”

Benji shook his head. Walter never talked much about it.

“It was your mother,” said Walter. Benji looked over in surprise. His uncle’s eyes were clouded with memory. “Mm-hmm. Everyone else had tried to snap me out of it–my team leader, my mates, even the head of my former department at the time. But in the end it was your mum. She came down here and booted my arse off the floor before almost carrying me out the door and chucking me in her car. She then proceeded to drive me out to dinner, get me just a little drunk, and tell me six ways to Sunday how she was not going to let her big brother dig himself down to death. She lived with me for over a year. That was when we got the prosthesis, old Bendy here”–Walter tapped his artificial leg– “and she got me back into shape. She suggested I start doing work from home. Take side contracts and the like. Thirteen years later, you came along, and suddenly there was a real point to my life again.” A look akin to guilt clouded his face. “You know, she blames me for getting you into the business.”

Benji winced. He could quite clearly recall his mother’s rage upon hearing her son intended to become an agent. Although, he remembered her being more angry about the fact that he was going overseas to work for “those bloody Americans.”

“She was different back then, your mum,” Walter continued. “Not as bitter as she is now. She was just as stubborn, though. I suppose I did rather get you into the business, though, didn’t I?” Benji half-smiled. His mother did have Walter to blame. After Walter caught Benji at his computer one night bypassing a firewall for an online game, he started to feed his nephew’s hacking fire. Benji was already good. Really good. Walter was better. And he taught him every trick in the book about routing codes, finding passwords, every little chink in the digital armor. When the Internet boomed in the late nineties, the two of them were boys in a candy shop. They spent every night surfing, seeking, hacking and cracking the beautiful new battleground behind the screen. By the time Benji joined IMF, there was not one piece of online information he could not get, not a single firewall the agency threw at him that he could not penetrate. Benji knew he was one of the best they had, and he was desperate to follow in his Uncle’s footsteps and become a field agent. There was just the whole fitness test thing. It took him a few tries, but finally he was out there, doing what he knew he was supposed to do. Too bad his first mission was Cobalt. 

“Yeah,” Benji said at length. “But I don’t regret it. I’ll never blame you for it, Uncle, even after all the insanity I’ve seen in the last year. I wouldn’t trade it for any other job.”

“I hope a day won’t come when you rescind those words, Benji,” Walter said gravely. “This line of work changes people. It changed me in more ways than one. You have good people with you. Hold onto them. Protect them with your life. Keeping friends is hard as an agent. Losing them is far, far worse.” Benji winced, hearing the grief in his Uncle’s voice, remembering the story of the bomb that, in ‘81, took his leg–and half his team.

Walter half-turned so he was looking into Benji’s eyes. “You will find your friend,” he said. “After all you’ve told me, I truly believe he is still alive. You will find the people responsible for this. You will fight them, and you will win.”

Benji felt his throat closing again. “How can you be so sure?” he whispered. “After everything…”

“Everything was yesterday,” said Walter fiercely. “And yesterday is dead and gone. You have to move forward, Benji.”

“I know,” said Benji, hating the weakness in his voice but at once not caring. “I know. But I’m scared, Uncle. I’m scared of what might happen.”

Walter sighed, leaning back in the swivel chair and gnawing on his bottom lip much like Benji did when he was deep in thought.

After a time, he said, “This business makes people cold, Benji. It takes away their hope, their sense of humanity. But you’re not like that yet, and I never want you to be. Hold onto your friends. Keep them close. If you four are together, you’ll save one another. I truly believe that. Sometimes belief is all you have that keeps you going. Belief in yourself, in each other, in whatever you choose. Just believe in something. ”

Benji just nodded silently.

Walter looked back at the screens. “What do you believe in, Benji?”

Benji’s soul felt heavy. “I don’t know anymore, Uncle.”

“Well, I’m not a religious man, as you know,” said Walter. “But there is one thing that has stuck with me all these years. I was sitting in a bar with my team leader, right after I passed the field exam. I was telling her how scared I was, even though I chose this path. She told me that as long as I held onto hope, I could get out of any situation. She said when she let go of hope, life would no longer be worth living. She kept a picture in her wallet of her little girl. She was fourteen, had cancer but was still fighting. Last I heard she was in remission. But during that time she could have died any day. My leader kept her picture to remind her why this was her job, who she had to protect. If her daughter could hold onto life, onto hope, so could she, no matter how bad things got. Now I do the same thing. When you feel lost, Benji, I want you to think about your team. Think about the people you love, the people for whom you hold onto hope. Think of your family, your home with them. Think about why you keep going. When you have nothing else to believe in, believe in that.”

Benji felt some of the blackness on his soul lessen as Walter’s words glowed into his heart. A random question popped into his head that somehow felt important. “What was her daughter’s name?” he asked.

Walter smiled distantly. “Sedona.”

A beeping came from the computer on Benji’s right, and the reverie was shattered. He pushed back his gloom and focused in on the screen. It showed the stairwell where they had first come in.

Benji felt the blood drain from his face. “Shit.”

“What is it?” asked Walter, turning to the same screen.

“They’re here.”


	7. Wish

About once every day, Ethan thought about Julia. What she was doing at that exact moment. It was around 11 at night in the States. Was she sleeping? Working late at the hospital? Out with her friends, laughing away memories of the life they could not have together?

Whatever it was, it was probably better than holing up in an abandoned shed on the outskirts of some obscure English settlement.

After about a half hour of circling the town with his lights off, Ethan finally found a place to hide the SUV. He’d decided to stash it behind a rise outside of town , out of view. Before leaving it, he raided the backseat and trunk for anything useful. He found four other guns, the smaller two of which he took, a med kit, spare clothes, and a ditchbag with food and water. He stuffed the med kit, clothes and a thin field-issue thermal blanket into the ditchbag and pulled on a fleece jacket before setting out over the farmland, toward the lights of Porlock, hoping the SUV would be there in the morning. He’d decided to take it on the Minehead, hoping that a car familiar to whoever hired the mercenaries may prove useful down the line.

Ethan poked around the fringes of Porlock until he found a decrepit old shed on the edge of a farm. After a glance at the house about a hundred yards away, confirming that all the lights were off, he elbowed the door open and snuck inside.

The shed was dark and smelled like mold and dead things. Ethan twisted on his Maglite and shined it around. The space was mostly empty, with a few rusty pieces of farm equipment shoved against the walls like forgotten toys. Cold wind whistled through the cracks in the weathered wood, but at least the interior was sheltered and hidden. Ethan pulled a picked up a piece of rebar and shoved it through the handles of the door. It wouldn’t hold for very long if someone tried to break in, but it would wake him in enough time to lock and load and be ready to run.

He made his way to the back, pulled out the blanket, and laid it on the rough-packed dirt of the floor. He slung his backpack down and collapsed against the wall and onto the blanket with an exhausted sigh.

Wariness and adrenaline kept his mind awake, but every part of his body ached with fatigue. He couldn’t sleep yet, though.

Turning the intensity down so it wouldn’t show through the cracks in the shed, Ethan placed his light upright on the ground. The beam reflected off the ceiling and cast the small space in a feeble white glow. He rummaged through the backpack and medkit and pulled out what he would need. Water. Energy bar. Gauze. Antibacterial cream. Ace bandage. Painkillers. Tape.

There was little he could do about the cracked ribs he was now sure he’d sustained. He just hoped they didn’t get any worse than they already were. His arm was sore and tender, but he couldn’t afford to sling it yet. When this was all over, if he was still alive, maybe then he could let it heal. He swallowed the painkillers and hoped they would take the worst of the edge off. Now for the fun part.

Bracing himself against the cold, Ethan eased off what was left of his shirt. It was stiff with salt and peppered with burn holes; he muttered in disgust and tossed it at the wall. Then he smeared some of the ointment onto his hand and rubbed it gently everywhere he could reach on his back, biting down on pained hisses as his fingers came in contact with the burned flesh. First and second-degree, probably. Painful, would take time to heal and would probably scar in places, but he’d gotten through worse before. He would have to again.

He finished, gasping in relief even as a blessed chill eased into his wounds as the local took effect. He pulled out another shirt from the backpack, put it on gingerly, and followed with a sweatshirt. Then he leaned as gently as he could against the cold wall of the shed, sipping water and taking small bites from the energy bar.

Should he sleep? He’d driven for about an hour, which would put the time at around four in the morning. He still had a few hours until dawn. He could snatch a few hours, and every fiber of his body shrieked for rest. Still, the biting fly of his guard kept him thinking. He switched off his flashlight to preserve the battery and sat silently in the cold darkness, munching on the bar. 

He ran over the checklist his mentor had drilled into him.

Location? Known. Outside Porlock, England.

Position? Defendable and secure with one escape route.

Weapons? Three handguns and a knife in the ditchbag. Hands. Head.

Personal condition? Toeing the line between shitty and all-around screwed.

Team? Ethan winced despite himself.

Would they try to come after him? Undoubtedly, and that scared him more than he cared to admit, for more reason than one. First off, whoever this shadow group was, they had people, connections, data. They knew who Ethan Hunt was, which meant almost without a doubt that they knew who Benji Dunn, Will Brandt and Jane Carter were too. If they could get to Ethan, they could get to his team, and his team would walk right into the lion’s jaws if it meant recovering their leader.

No, not just their leader. Their friend. He winced again. That was the other thing that scared him. The last year had bonded the four of them irrevocably. And here he was, injured and alone and hunted, and there was a huge likelihood that they would end up in the same position before this was all over. Because of him.

Ethan pressed his forehead to his knees. He could not lose his team now. He knew, with an absolute, pit-in-his-stomach certainty, that after everything he had sacrificed–his wife, his safety, and a good chunk of his soul– that doing so would destroy him. His end would not come from a bullet or a bomb. It would come from an empty container of sleeping pills or the bottom of a whiskey glass, its drinker driven there by the ghosts of the family he’d once had, only to be lost fighting yet another war he did not fully understand.

Ethan sniffed before gritting his teeth against his demons. “Act fast, but use your head” was a tactic he usually reserved for when his life was in imminent danger and copious amounts of adrenaline were pouring into his system, but sometimes the only way to drive out the darkness in his soul was with the hard-edged logic his mind could produce. He continued down the checklist, marking off each one until he came to one that gave him pause.

Chip. He’d barely even thought about it. Every IMF agent, upon graduation into field service was chipped with an electronic ID tag about the size of a grain of rice, inserted just beneath the skin of their lower backs. Ethan used to have a more archaic version back in the nineties, but during the Job fiasco he’d had Claire cut it out. When he returned to service the agency rechipped him only to remove it again for his stint in that Russian prison to gather intel on Cobalt. As far as he knew now, we wasn’t chipped at all, unless IMF had at some point drugged him and done it in his sleep without his ever knowing. Honestly, he wouldn’t put it past them.

But it was a problem. Chips contained trackers, enabling the agency to find any operative in the world who was equipped with a functioning one. These days the chips were inserted so close to the spinal column that rogue agents could not remove them out on their own like Ethan had without risking paralysis or worse. IMF recovered a lot more rogues now than they had when Ethan first joined the agency. But he was MIA now, chipless and phoneless. He really had no way of reaching backup. For the first time in over a year, he was on his own.

Nothing but a ghost with a target. Ethan smirked darkly into his knees. He’d been there before. He knew how to play this game.

So why did he have such a bad feeling that this particular game had an element he could not see, one that would cause the outcome to be different from those he had played in the past? That this time, it was not chess, but a twisted Jenga, and if he missed something and pulled out the wrong piece of the puzzle, the world would come down on top of him?

Ethan started awake.

The wind had died down, and tepid light shone through the larger cracks in the shed. Ethan stifled a groan as he pulled his forehead off his knees, rubbing a crick in his neck with his good arm. His back felt better but was still depressingly sensitive to touch, and every time he inhaled it felt like his ribs were shattered glass that cut up his insides. His arm was wickedly sore, but more or less usable. He got carefully to his feet, scooping up his flashlight and repacking it. It was light outside, which meant it was time to move. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, and he grimaced at the presence of day. He’d wanted to be up and out before sunrise, but apparently his battered body had had other ideas. Tucking his gun into his waistband and gently shouldering his pack, he unbarred the door and peered outside.

Steely clouds hung low in the sky, veiling the sun and washing out the landscape. Ethan winced as his eyes adjusted. Clumps of forests and rolling expanses of fields, dotted here and there with houses, stretched to the horizon on three sides. On the fourth, buildings rose above the trees. A church bell chimed over the morning. Porlock.

He could only hope no one had found the SUV. Ethan closed the shed door again, pulled up his hood and started moving. His breath puffed in the cold winter air, and he was dimly surprised there was no snow on the ground. It sure felt cold enough.

Soon he came to the rise he had clambered up the night before. He crouched low to the tufty grass and belly-crawled forward. He heard nothing, which was a good sign, but someone had found the car and was waiting for its driver, Ethan didn’t want to waltz right into a potential trap. He crept forward and peered over the top of the rise.

The SUV sat silent and solitary behind the hill. Apparently a seagull had decided it was a good perch for the night, but other than that the car and area around it appeared deserted. Ethan sighed quietly in relief and made his way down. The gull gave an angered squawk and flapped away.

Ethan opened the driver’s side door, chucked his bag onto the passenger seat and climbed inside. The air inside the car was stale and smelled like old blood. He grimaced, back flaring in pain as he leaned gently back into the driver’s seat. A small, hopeless voice deep in his brain inquired as to how he was going to storm the base when he could barely walk, but he pushed it down. Act now, think later. He fired up the engine and cranked the heat to full blast.

Five minutes later, he was back on A39, headed for Minehead. The GPS was still functioning, the black line of the mercenaries’ route blazing invitingly. The agent, the hunter in him screamed to go, but as he drove he started thinking more about what exactly he was doing. He was injured, outgunned, and alone. He had very little chance of walking away from this one alive. And yet something in the pit of his stomach was driving him toward the flag at the end of that black line.

Ethan knew he should not rely on get feeling alone. Brandt, and even the Secretary herself had berated him in the past about being too impulsive, too spontaneous. They were both sure it would get him or a member of his team killed one day. But that instinct had saved him in the past many times, and he would not walk away from it now. He needed to end this, alone. These people had come after him, and he would not endanger the lives of any other agents to help fix this, especially those of his team. It was up to him now.

For the next half hour he kept his eyes on the road in front of him, and tried not to think too much about the dread building up inside him.

The checkered flag, morbidly cheerful, marked a remote farm outside of Minehead proper. Ethan drove the car off the road half a mile away from the house, hiding it on the edge of a thick stand of trees. He didn’t cover it up though, lest he need a getaway vehicle. He left the pack but took every weapon he had and checked them. It wasn’t much. Three handguns, two with full magazines and one with half, and an eight-inch knife, which he tucked in his belt under his jacket. Oh, well. It would have to do. The clouds were growing thicker overhead, and thunder threatened the distance. He should wait until dark to move in, but he needed daylight to scope out the facility. Ethan zipped up his jacket against the rising wind and started to move through the woods toward the farmhouse.

The forest ended a hundred yards away from the house itself, where it gave way to a wide, uncut lawn. From here, the house looked like it had been deserted for many years. The paint was peeling like blisters. The windows were broken, the interior dark and the perimeter silent. Hmm. Maybe this had been merely a meeting place for the mercenaries, and wasn’t a base at all. Still, the feeling of dread persisted, a gnawing certainty in his gut that something was wrong with this place. He wouldn’t leave yet. Ethan hunkered against a tree and waited. For what, he was not sure. He drew one of the handguns and rested it against his thigh. The trees were silent.

Then he heard the first scream.

The sound made the hairs on Ethan’s arms stand up, and he resisted the primal urge to flee into the relative safety of the woods. His hand tightened around his gun, because the scream came from the house, and it was not a scream of fear, or surprise. He’d heard torture enough to know the difference. Someone inside there was in agony.

The dread in his stomach strengthened, bordering on nausea. He’d never felt this way before on a mission. Almost­–compromised. He couldn’t even explain why, but he did know one thing: he had to get in there. Every fiber of his being screamed it.

Ethan scanned the house again. There were no obvious guards, no sniper rifles peeking out of the darkened windows in the upper story. He prepared to run.

He was not being logical, and he was not thinking this through. For a moment his resolve faltered. He didn’t even know whom it was that was being tortured. It could be some turncoat member of this shadow group, or a target with information. He had no reason to go charging inside, guns blazing.

But his instinct argued otherwise.

The scream came again, this time longer and hoarser. Ethan felt the familiar veneer of battle fall over him. He did one more quick scan for movement and sprinted across the lawn.

There was an open door on the porch. Ethan jumped silently next to it and pressed his back against the side of the house. He drew his knife. Whoever went down would go down silently. He had to be quick. He could hear voices now, low and accented. He pulled open the door without a sound and crept inside.

He really should have encountered more resistance by now. This was probably a trap, but if so, why no watchers on the third floor? Why such light defenses? Why not just shoot him when he came across the yard?

Unless they did not want him dead. Ethan grit his teeth. No, they had wanted him dead when they blew up the plane and sent mercenaries to shoot him off a cliff. He was pretty confident they wanted him dead. They really did not know he was here.

He followed the voices down the main hall. The house was old, the inside rotten, and he prayed desperately that the wooden floors would not creak under his weight. There was a thick layer of dust coating the floor, and in it were two sets of footprints. Between then was a single long smear. A drag mark. The tracks led down the hall to a door that was slightly ajar. Ethan advanced, gun in one hand, knife in the other.

He came to the door and crouched near it, listening.

“I’ll ask once more and only once,” snarled one voice. Austrian accent, male, probably late thirties. And by the sound of it, pissed off. “Where is he?”

A beat of silence. Then: “Ah, damn it, Jurich,” said another voice. “You made him pass out again.” Ethan was surprised. American, also male, but unfamiliar. Suddenly, powerfully, he wished Brandt was here.

“He’s pretending,” said the Austrian, Jurich. “He just does not want to answer us. I know he knows. He must know where he is.”

“Wake up,” snapped the American. There was the sound of an open palm on a cheek, and a quiet groan. “Answer us. Where is he?”

There was another moment of silence. Then quietly, painfully: “Go..to..hell.”

Ethan’s throat closed in shock. No way. It couldn’t be.

“We’ve been at this for two hours, Williams,” said Jurich. “We’re not getting anything more from him. Let’s just kill him already.”

“No,” said Williams. “He knows something we can use. Do you really think the bosses will be pleased if we come back empty-handed? Shock him again.”

Ethan kicked through the door and charged.

He took in every detail in the fraction of a second. The musty walls of the room, the two men whirling around in shock, drawing their weapons, and the man tied to a chair behind them, head down.

Jurich drew a handgun. Ethan hurled his knife, and it sank to the hilt into the Austrian’s chest. He went down without screaming.

“Jurich!” cried the other man, Williams. He snarled and turned to Ethan, bringing his gun to bear.

Ethan aimed down and shot him in the leg. Williams shrieked and collapsed, gun clattering out of his grip. Ethan kicked him in the temple and the man went limp.

Ethan moaned and clutched his arm close to his chest as the adrenaline began to ebb and the pain returned. He scanned the room for more threats, but it was empty.

Empty, except for the man tied to the chair, who had lifted his head up and was staring in shock at Ethan. Blood matted his hair and coated one side of his head and his face was pale, but his blue eyes were bright with sudden joy. His face cracked into a smile. “I knew it,” he rasped. “Oh my God, I knew you weren’t dead.”

Ethan almost fell to his knees.

“Brandt?”


	8. The Connoisseur of Devil's Faces

Ethan looked almost as bad as Brandt felt. And that was saying something, because Brandt felt like he’d just been hit by lighting while going two rounds with an angry boar. Still, there was no one he would rather be seeing than his team leader, though anyone would have been better than the two creeps who thought it would be fun to drive too much electricity to be healthy into his body again and again.

“Hey, Ethan,” he said casually, trying for nonchalance after his earlier outburst. Brandt had a manly reputation to maintain, after all. So what if the relief he felt was so powerful he doubted he’d have been able to stand even if he wasn’t injured? “Just in the neighborhood, or what?”

Ethan’s face could have been cut from stone; the momentary elation that had been there a moment before was gone. Brandt felt his grin fade. “Ethan?”

Without saying a word, Ethan reached out and felt carefully along Brandt’s neck, behind his ears, and on the back of his head. Brandt winced as his fingers ghosted over the goose egg on his temple, but his confusion dissolved. “No masks, dude, I promise. Unfortunately, it’s really me.” 

Ethan still looked wary. “Cobalt. You had to jump into an overheating computer main. What did you say when you got out?”

Brandt grinned tiredly. Like he could ever forget that. “’Next time, I get to seduce the rich guy.’”

An exhausted smile lit Ethan’s face, one of his rare, truly genuine ones. “Just checking,” he said, moving behind Brandt to cut his bonds. “People in masks have given us enough trouble in the past, after all.” Ethan moved behind him. Brandt felt a serrated tug at his wrists, and a moment later the coarse ropes that had been biting his wrists for the last half hour fell blessedly away. He gently moved his hands into his lap, rubbing feeling back into his arms and wrists.

“Ethan, what happened?” he asked. “With the plane…”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” said Ethan, as he knelt next to Brandt and put Brandt’s arm over his shoulder.

“The way to where?” Brandt asked, trying not hiss in pain.

“Anywhere but here.” Ethan rose carefully, supporting nearly all of Brandt’s weight. 

“Ethan,” said Brandt, grabbing his wrist to stop him. He looked into his team leader’s face, taking in the paleness and gauntness, the hunted look in the dark green eyes. It was the best thing he’d seen all day. “It’s really good to see you, dude.”

Ethan grinned faintly again, clapping Brandt gently on the chest. “You too.” They kept moving.

“How many were outside?” asked Brandt. He couldn’t see any more bodies in the hallway.

“None,” said Ethan. He sounded troubled.

“None?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s weird.”

“I know. Don’t you think it was a little convenient that there were only two guys on you? And that there was no perimeter guard?”

“None,” Brandt repeated incredulously. “Seriously? It felt like an army when they brought me in.”

“When was that?” asked Ethan.

“Just before dawn.”

“You were conscious?”

“Mostly. Enough to feel way too many hands pawing me as they took me in here. I heard more too. It must have been more than just those two guys.”

“Where are Benji and Jane?” Brandt was shocked to hear the shadow of a quiver in Ethan’s voice. He was more rattled than Brandt had realized.

The analyst swallowed. “I don’t know. We got to London around midnight; we were staying at Benji’s uncle’s place. He’s a retiree, so don’t yell at us for getting a civilian involved.” Ethan scoffed lightly. “Walter and Benji were manning the security cams,” Brandt continued. “Jane and I were trying to get some sleep. Next thing I know it’s totally dark and none of us can breathe. I did see one guy, when I managed to get a flashlight on. I had about two seconds to drink his face in before some asshole increased my likelihood for dementia later on in life.” He waved vaguely at the wound on his head.

“Did you recognize him?” Ethan asked. By then they were almost to the front door.

“No,” Brandt replied lowly. “They were all masked. And I’m not happy about it.”

Ethan leaned Brandt against the wall. “Did any of the others get out?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see.” Brandt wiped blood from his eye. 

Ethan pulled a handgun and cracked the front door open. “The yard’s still clear,” he said, sounding doubtful. “This isn’t right.”

“Who are these guys, Ethan?” asked Brandt, pressing his head against the wall as a particularly vicious throb jolted him to the bottom of his spine. “And what do they want with us?”

Ethan’s face darkened. “I don’t know.” He stowed his gun and pulled Brandt up. “And I’m not happy about it either.”

“Where exactly are we going?” Brandt asked. “Do you have a car? You can let go of me, by the way. I’m okay, just a little weak. ’” Ethan moved off slightly, but he kept his arm near Brandt’s if he lost his strength again. Closer now, Brandt could see Ethan was actually hurt worse than he was. He was holding his right arm close to his body, and the skin around his eyes was tight with muffled pain. The way he was moving, too… anyone who didn’t know Ethan wouldn’t have noticed it, but Brandt could see the slight tenderness in his motions. He was favoring, and trying not to move his upper body too much. Ethan hadn’t come out of the crash unscathed after all.

“Yeah,” said Ethan said to Brandt’s earlier question. They came to the porch. “I have a car. But we’re ditching it. I stole it from mercenaries who tried to kill me.”

Brandt’s already concussed head spun further. “You have some serious explaining to do, dude.”

“You too,” said Ethan, giving Brandt an arresting look. “What exactly were the three of you doing in London?”

Brandt scoffed. “What do you think, Ethan?” He didn’t need to bother explaining.

“Can’t you guys just let me die in peace?” Ethan growled, but Brandt thought he heard an undercurrent of gratitude.

They were almost to the treeline when they heard the bushes rustle.

Ethan brought his handgun up almost too fast for the eyes to follow. That had been too loud for a small animal. Brandt followed his arm.

Someone was coming out of the shadowy trees, their features obscured by the foliage.

“Keep coming and I will shoot,” said Ethan, threat clear in his voice. The shadow paused.

“Come out slowly with your hands where I can see them.”

The figure moved out into the light. 

Brandt gasp-laughed in relief. “Oh, thank God.”

Ethan lowered his gun. “Benji–” 

“DON’T MOVE!” Benji roared. He pulled out a handgun of his own and aimed it straight at Ethan’s center mass. “Don’t. Move.”

“Benji…” Ethan slowly lowered his gun to the ground. “It’s me.”

“I can’t know that!” Even from here, Brandt could see Benji’s hands were shaking. His face was pale and scared, blue eyes wide. There was blood on his shirt, but Brandt couldn’t tell if it was his or not. “I can’t know for sure.”

“Benji,” said Brandt, in the same tone he would use to calm down that one psychotic dog he had when he was twelve. Granted, that dog ended up biting him and disappearing into the night never to be seen again, but same concept. “Put the gun down, man. It’s okay.”

“You’re not Ethan,” Benji repeated. “Ethan’s dead. You’re just some guy in a mask who wants to kill my friend.” Brandt swallowed. There was a deep, agonized strain to Benji’s voice, a terror in his eyes Brandt had never seen before. Something had put Benji close to the edge­–close enough Brandt wasn’t sure he wouldn’t shoot Ethan, or him. Almost reflexively, he raised his own hands.

“Fine,” said Ethan, stepping forward, hands in the air. “Fine. I’ll prove it to you.” Benji kept his gun up. His eyes were bloodshot and desperate and scared.

Ethan kept his hands wide, open, his stance relaxed. “My name is Ethan Matthew Hunt. I’m forty-five years old. My birthday is on the winter solstice, next week. You guys were planning a surprise party, which I pretended not to know about even though I’ve been hearing the three of you whispering behind my back for the last month. You’re my teammate, Benji Dunn, and the guy next to me is Will Brandt, whom we all refer to by his last name because…you know what, I don’t even know why. Jane Carter is our fourth. We all met last year when the Kremlin blew up and Cobalt tried to create a nuclear apocalypse. We’ve been a team since then, and I’ve gotten to know all of your guys’ weird nuances since then. Benji, you like to put butter and cinnamon in your tea, even though the rest of us think it’s totally weird. Jane talks in her sleep and has an unhealthy obsession with John Hughes movies, which she re-watches constantly. Brandt sings “Dancing Queen” in the shower when he thinks we can’t hear.” Brandt stuttered in protest, but Ethan rolled on. “You three are my team. You’re my family, and you’re all I have left.” His voice softened. “So, you think you might want to put the gun down, Benji?”

For a blink, there was total silence.

Then, with a whimper, Benji dropped the pistol and stumbled forward. Ethan caught him awkwardly and the technician fell against him. “It can’t be you,” he kept muttering. “No. Can’t be.” Ethan grimaced, but the strain around his eyes had softened some.

Brandt patted Benji on the back, feeling the exhausted tension in the other man’s body. He’d never seen Benji this bad, this…vulnerable. He was hurt, or drugged, or something had happened to reduce him to this tearful hug-topus.

Brandt blinked. Wow. The second they come across the Atlantic to find their missing teammate they get shot at, separated, and apparently, de-aged. Some rescuers they were.

“I think we all have some explaining to do,” said Ethan. “First things first. Back into the creepy house we go.”

“Wait, what?” asked Brandt, as Ethan pulled one of Benji’s limp arms over his shoulder. Brandt went to his other side and took the other arm. “I thought you said we were leaving? Why are we going back in the house? You said you had a car? What’s wrong with a car?”

“Change of plans. We can’t leave yet,” said Ethan. They moved awkwardly up the porch and went inside. “First off, we’re all hurt. I don’t even know what’s wrong with Benji. I’m trying to avoid the hospital, but we need to find out what’s in his system in case it’s something we can’t fix. Second, those guys on you? Something tells me they’re friends of the people who tried to off me in the first place.”

“They were,” said Brandt, wincing as he thought about how he’d been spending his afternoon until Ethan showed up. “That’s why they were torturing me. They kept asking where you were. Ethan,” he said, grabbing his team leader’s upper arm, making him pause. “They know who we are.”

“I know.” Ethan’s voice was dark.

“I mean, who we are. Why we’re a team. They know how to get to us.”

“I know,” Ethan repeated, kicking open the door. “Which means it’s time to get ahead of their game.”

They stumbled into the house, passing the room with the two bodies, one dead and one unconscious. They made their way to the back, into another ruined room, this one somehow unlooted. It must have been a dining room once; a long, dusty table sat forgotten in the center of the space. Carven chairs, once shining with varnish, were knocked over or still shoved against the table or walls. A series of sofa huddled light frightened animals in the corner of the room. Brandt and Ethan made a beeline for the nearest one.

Benji’s eyes had slipped shut and he was murmuring deliriously. Brandt tried to swallow his alarm. They laid him gently on the couch, and Ethan instantly began removing his bloodied clothes. Brandt knelt and started inspecting Benji as well, but in the corner of his eye he started to scan Ethan. He knew his team leader wouldn’t treat his own injuries until the mission was complete or they were out of immediate danger, whichever came first. Right now, neither was the case. Brandt read the signs. The careful way Ethan was moving suggested abdominal damage; the slight rattle in his breath and the slow speed at which he inhaled–broken or cracked ribs. And he wasn’t using his right arm much. In fact, as Brandt watched, Ethan winced slightly and tucked his hand against his chest to immobilize his arm, continuing to remove Benji’s shirt with one hand. Wordlessly, Brandt joined in, eventually gently pushing Ethan out of his way. The other agent sighed almost silently and leaned against the sofa.

“Ethan–“

“I’m fine, Brandt,” said Ethan, in his we’re-done-talking-about-it tone. “Or at least, I will be.”

Brandt scowled, but didn’t look up as he finished removing Benji’s jacket and shirt. He frowned. “What the–

Ethan’s hand came blurring down to block the pin from activating the hidden bomb on Benji’s torso, triggered by the removal of his shirt. Brandt froze, the words dying on his lips as he stared in shock.

It was a bomb unlike one he had ever seen before. It didn’t even look like a bomb, with the typical blood-red digital clock counting down the remaining seconds of your life, or the packs of C4 and detonator. In fact, if it wasn’t for the way all the remaining blood had drained from Ethan’s face and the delicate way he was holding his hand on the mechanism, Brandt wouldn’t have thought it was a bomb at all. It was almost completely flat and about the size and shape of a playing card, silver and smooth. There was a trigger mechanism on the top of it, where Ethan’s pinky finger was now currently lodged. It looked like a miniscule firing pin that, had it not been stopped, would have penetrated the casing and activated its contents. Brandt didn’t breathe.

“Don’t move,” said Ethan. “I’ve seen these before. They’re sensitive, but easy to get rid of. Get my knife; it’s in my belt. Left side. No sudden moves.”

Brandt swallowed. He reached slowly under Ethan’s jacket and drew out the six-inch field knife. “Good,” said Ethan. “Now Brandt, I need you to stay calm. There should be a really thin wire running from the trigger mechanism to the inside of Benji’s shirt. Find it. Be gentle.”

Brandt breathed out, nodding and trying to steady his hands. He ghosted over Ethan’s fingers still lodged in the mechanism and felt a single long strand of hair. No, not hair. But the wire was thin and delicate enough to almost fool him. Brandt could barely even see the damn thing. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, careful not to tug it. “I have it.”

“Good,” said Ethan. “Very carefully, without pulling on my end, cut the wire.” Brandt did. “Okay. Now lift the shirt away.” Brandt bundled Benji’s shirt with the wire still inside and chucked it away.

“Is that it?” asked Brandt quietly.

“Not quite.” Ethan looked up at him. “Brandt, you need to do something for me.”

Brandt frowned in confusion. “What?”

“Duck.” And with that, Ethan ripped the entire thing off of Benji’s chest. An enraged beeping came from the bomb, growing higher every second. Brandt hit the ground just as Ethan hurled it out the window behind and to the right of Brandt’s head.

It cleared the sill just as the packet exploded, sending sparks and dregs of fire and a good deal of smoke everywhere. The remaining glass shards around the edge of the window blew in all directions. A chunk of the windowsill suddenly disappeared. 

Jesus. That thing really packed a punch for such a small bomb. Brandt sagged against the sofa, feeling giddy and sick to his stomach at the same time.

“Good job,” said Ethan, letting out a huge breath. He leaned against the couch as well, still pressing his arm to his chest. He closed his eyes in exhaustion.

A loud groan came from the couch. “What the hell…” Benji sat up, and Brandt felt his insides unclench with relief. “Brandt? Ethan? Wait wait wait, no, Ethan’s missing. Presumed dead. OH WOW my head hurts. Where are we? And why does my mouth taste like a sixpence that’s boiled in acid?”

Ethan opened his eyes and patted Benji’s knee. “Nice to see you back in the land of the conscious, Benji.”

“And before you try to shoot him again,” said Brandt to the techie, “it really is Ethan. He’s alive. Chill out.”

“What the…” Benji rubbed his eyes. The color was returning to his cheeks, and he seemed steady for a guy who had just had a bomb glued to his chest. “When did I try to shoot Ethan? And how did I end up on a couch, and where did you both come from?” Benji was rubbing his hands through his thinning hair, wide blue eyes taking in the details of the room.

“Benji,” said Ethan slowly. “Settle down. I am way too tired and my head hurts way too much to answer all of those in order and accurately.”

“Wait a minute…” Benji’s brow furrowed. “Did I–hug you?”

Ethan grinned, some humor returning. “Like my estranged lover.”

Benji groaned and fell back onto the couch. Brandt just chuckled, feeling some of the tension that had been choking him for the last week ease. Jane was missing, they were in rural England in the winter with no phones, a hostage, a handful of weapons and very little chance of getting out alive, but one thing had gone right. He had Ethan and Benji back.

()()()()

“Okay,” said Ethan. “Start from the top. You arrived in London, went to Walter’s house. Then what?”

Night had fallen. The three of them were huddling around a tiny fire in the center of the dining room. They had shoved the table away and broken the legs off chairs for kindling, igniting it with a pocket lighter Brandt had that miraculously still worked. Ethan had been reluctant to light the fire, but the temperature was dropping quickly, and the sky had clouded over as the afternoon faded. The last thing they needed was to be snowed inside this pile with no way of keeping warm. Brandt kept one hand unconsciously on the gun Ethan had given him, glancing out the broken windows every now and then, waiting for the time he would look and find a face. He’d rolled his sleeves past the burn marks on his wrists where the electrodes had been attached, letting the cold night air cool the abused skin. He’d also fashioned a sling for Ethan’s arm, which, as he’d suspected, had been dislocated and badly put back. Benji was okay, still a little shaky, but it seemed whatever had been impeding his brain function had blown up with the bomb. There was a pinprick mark inside the reddened skin of his chest, and Brandt was willing to bet there had been a drug in the bomb that impeded Benji’s perception of reality.

Brandt shivered nearer to the fire, wrapping his still-bloodied coat around him. He let out a breath, hoping some of his exhaustion and low-level anxiety would be dispelled with it. “Jane and I went to bed. Walter and Benji were on watch.”

“We saw them coming,” Benji said, eyes in the fire. “We had cameras. We all got armed; Walter had an arsenal in his broom closet.”

“He had an arsenal in the broom closet?” asked Ethan incredulously. “Damn. I want to meet this guy.”

“We were ready,” continued Benji. “Then the whole place blacked out. They had cut the power to the entire apartment complex.”

“We heard the doors get broken down,” said Brandt. “We couldn’t see. We stood together. Then there was tear gas everywhere, and we couldn’t breathe. Things went downhill from there.”

Benji coughed. “That’s putting it a bit mildly. Shall I go first, then?”

Brandt knew what he meant. He leaned back on his couch, which they had dragged over to the fire. “By all means.”

“Right,” said Benji. “After they fired the tear gas, I grabbed onto Jane’s arm. We were separated almost instantly. They weren’t trying to kill us, I don’t think, but they had no qualms about mangling us up a bit. I took a blow to the stomach and fell, then I think I got hit in the head, because after that I was waking up on a table. I was blindfolded and tied down, but I could hear voices. They were speaking in a language I don’t know, but if I had to venture I guess I’d say it was–“

“Very badly-pronounced German?” asked Brandt, hoping he was wrong.

Benji looked startled. “Yeah. It sounded German, hand of harsh and angry-sounding. I mean, that makes all German-speakers sound like harsh and angry people, which is actually really xenophobic and offensive. Sorry about that. I haven’t really been exposed to much German, I mean, just Russian and the occasional French–“

“Benji,” said Ethan, sounding, as he almost always did, completely calm. “Focus.”

“Right,” said the technician. It may have just been the firelight, but Brandt thought he saw Benji’s ears turn red. “So yeah, I think it was German. And like I said, not much German in my life. But there was definitely one guy who sounded different from the others. Like it wasn’t his first language.”

“Any guesses as to what was his first language?” asked Ethan.

Benji paused. “If you put a gun to my head–which, yes he did–I’d say American.”

Brandt and Ethan looked to each other. “Williams,” said Brandt. “His friend Jurich was Austrian, or he sure sounded Austrian. And since German is Austria’s official language–“

“It makes sense they would all use it,” followed up Ethan. “But why such a major language? Lots of agents know it, it’s hardly code.”

“Yeah,” said Benji. “I mean, I’m not the best with foreign language, but I took German in secondary school.”

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “They spoke English to you, right?” he asked Brandt.

Brandt paused, dread sinking in his stomach. “Not all the time. They bounced between English and Russian.”

“Russian?” Ethan frowned. “You’re sure?”

Brandt scowled. “I may have flunked out of Spanish, Hunt, but my Russian is perfect. It and Swahili are the only foreign languages I do know­­–”

Brandt felt his eyes widen even as he saw Ethan stiffen. “Oh, shit,” whispered Brandt.

“What?” asked Benji, sounding equal parts faintly bewildered and slightly indignant. “You’re doing that thing again, the whole mind-meld, figuring-things-out-at-the-same-time-and-not-telling-Benji thing.”

Ethan rubbed his eyes. “Two things,” he said. “One, we’re not dealing with a single-nation organization. Whoever these people are, they come from all over, and don’t fall under one flag. Which makes them harder to place and harder to predict.”

“And two,” said Brandt, the dread from earlier solidifying, “they don’t just know our agent files. The fact that we’re a team. They knew the only foreign languages I’m fully proficient in are Russian and Swahili. And now that I think about it, I heard traces of that earlier on, when they were transporting me. I just caught snatches, but enough to know that those were the only two languages they used. I thought I was lucky at the time; now I’m not so sure. And Benji, they only spoke English and German around you, which means they knew that you would be able to understand them. That’s not coincidence. And the fact that you took German when you were in high school?” Brandt pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus. They know everything about us. They know back to before we joined the IMF.” Brandt slapped a hand angrily on the floor. “God damn it! Who the hell are these people!?” 

“Settle down,” said Ethan, but Brandt thought he sounded rattled. “We’re going to figure this out, but we won’t if we panic. That’s clearly what they want.”

“Clearly,” snapped Brandt, “as they seem to know everything about us. Including the language classes we took in high school.”

“Brandt,” said Ethan, in his if-you-don’t-shut-up-right-now-someone’s-going-to-bleed-and-it-won’t-be-me tone.

Brandt crossed his arms and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. I just…”

“I know,” said Ethan quietly. “It’s okay. We just need to stay calm. Whoever these people are, they know us. They know our methods, and they know our weaknesses. Which means they’re going to try and get inside our heads. We can’t let them. I know you guys are spooked. I’m spooked. But this is our job, and we need to do it, and we need to do it well. Okay?”

Brandt sighed, stressed, but nodded.

Benji said, “Oh, sure yeah. I’m not scared. Who’s scared?”

Ethan looked him right in the eye and said, “I’m plenty scared, Benji. And not for myself.”

Brandt’s stomach lurched. No. Julia Hunt was dead, and she was staying that way to the rest of the world. But there were others…

Brandt struggled to quell the rising fear in his gut. If they had found out this much about them…had they found their histories? Families?

Clint…Brandt swallowed. If they had brought his twin into this…

Actually, what was he thinking. Clint was fine. If he got taken, he had a team of fully-funded, highly trained superheroes coming after him, the lucky asshole. Brandt and his little band? They were on their own.

Ethan’s dark green eyes flickered with the light of the fire. His brow was furrowed in the way the made Brandt want to take immediate cover. “Benji,” said Ethan. “Keep going. You got knocked out, you woke up with people speaking German. What then? Give me any details you got.” 

Benji sighed, his cheeks puffing out. “Okay. So, yeah, I woke up on a table. It was bright, like a doctor’s office, or a surgery, or something. Which I guess it was. But I couldn’t see very well, and my head hurt a lot. I was tied down, and they’d taken my shirt off. I guess there were about three people around me, and they sounded pissed off, like they were having an argument. But like I said, not a lot of German in my life, so I had no idea what they were talking about. Then someone decided to put out a very large cigarette on my chest and that’s the last thing I remember for a little bit.”

“They were attaching the bomb to you,” inferred Brandt, nodding.

Benji rolled his eyes. “No, Brandt, they literally had the world’s largest cigarette and they decided to put it out on me because, hey, they don’t make ashtrays for giants.” Brandt held his hands up in surrender.

“So yeah,” said Benji, continuing. “Next thing I knew they had tossed me out of a car. I thrashed through those woods for a while–I wasn’t thinking clearly. I wasn’t thinking at all. Then I was outside the house, Ethan was there and, like I said, I wasn’t thinking. I would’ve shot anyone I ran into in that state, I think.” He looked at them both gratefully. “Thanks for talking me down, guys. And sorry I tried to shoot you, Ethan.”

Ethan cracked a grin. “Forget it, Benj. We’ve all wanted to shoot me at some point.”

“No problem, man,” said Brandt. “What are friends for? Especially agents. It’s our job to stop us from shooting one another.”

Benji shrugged. “And, now we’re here. So, I bring nothing useful to the equation. I wake up in the setting for a kinky fanfiction and have a bomb glued to my chest.”

“A kinky–never mind. I don’t want to know,” said Ethan. He raised his eyebrows at Brandt. “How ‘bout you?”

Brandt sighed again, lacing his fingers behind his head and staring at the fire, recalling the events of the last few days.

“Well, my experience was decidedly less fun. When they broke in to the apartment, I was closest to the arsenal. I had a gun by the time the tear gas hit, but I lost it quickly. I couldn’t see. I tried to stay with the others, but someone whacked me, and the lights went out. I don’t know how much time I lost, but I woke up a few times. They had a bag over my head, but I could hear them. Swahili, Russian, like I said before. Which, apparently, they were doing on purpose. Which means anything I heard is probably faked and useless.”

“Any information is good information,” said Ethan. “What did you hear?”

“Not much,” admitted Brandt. “They mentioned the house they took me to–this house. Williams and Jurich were there too, and one other guy. He sounded familiar for some reason. I couldn’t place it, though.” Brandt scowled. He prided himself on his near-eidetic memory, his ability to match voices to faces. But the identity of the third man in the vehicle still eluded him.

“After they carried me in here, tied me to a chair and got to work,” Brandt continued, wincing at the thought of the electrical torture the two had employed. “They wanted to know where you were, Ethan. Something about dead men not shooting up entire squadrons and stealing their SUVs.”

Ethan’s eyes glittered mischievously. He nodded for Brandt to continue.

“Then said dead man burst in and starting kicking ass,” said Brandt. “Killed one, knocked out gagged the other, and tied him up against the wall.” Brandt pointed to the far side of the room, where Williams was still slumped against the wall. Ethan and Brandt had dragged him as Benji set up the fire.

“And here we are.” Brandt fell silent, his end of the story finished.

The fire crackled anxiously as the silence between the three men expanded. Ethan stared intently into it, his brow still furrowed in that way that foretold recklessness.

“So that’s all we know,” said Benji, looking at the floor. “Basically, we have no idea who they are, where they’re keeping Jane or Walter, or what they want with us. We’re at a dead end.” He tugged on the ends of his thinning hair, the exhaustion and stress of the last few days finally wearing him down.

Ethan stood suddenly. “No, we’re not.”

Benji frowned in confusion. “What do you mean we’re not?”

Ethan strode to the other side of the room, where a silent figure slumped against the wall. “Because I know just who to ask.” 

Williams, gagged and bound with the very ropes that had secured Brandt earlier, glared up at Ethan. One side of his face was still purple from where he’d been kicked. His olive skin was pale, curly black hair bloody and tangled, but his eyes, a startling pale blue, were fierce. Ethan grabbed his arm and dragged him bodily over to the fire.

“Ethan,” said Brandt warningly, his stomach dropping. He knew what Ethan had done, what he was willing to do to protect his team. But Brandt’s stomach still soured at the thought of torture. “Don’t–“

“Relax, Brandt,” Ethan said cooly. “We’re not there yet. Whether or not we get there is up to our fine friend here.” He ripped the gag out of the prisoner’s mouth.

Williams spat onto the ground before Ethan and ran his tongue over his newly liberated lips. “Fuck you.”

“You too,” Brandt said succinctly. “You ever had electricity deliberately pumped into your body, on top of a concussion, on top of goddamn jetlag? It still feels like five o’clock in the afternoon to me.” Now that Brandt was hearing the dickwad’s voice again, the voice that had passively grilled him as he and his partner tried to turn his body into a battery, holding Williams’s feet to the fire a little–literally–seemed a lot more appealing.

“Williams,” said Ethan, standing over the other man and holding his gaze, “whom do you work for?”

The man’s face twisted in derision, but Brandt thought he saw a flicker of apprehension. A quick glance at Ethan’s face told him why. Brandt’s team leader’s face was deadly clam, but his eyes were arctic. For the hundredth time since meeting him, Brandt thanked whatever gods were left that Ethan was on his side.

“Tell me,” Ethan said softly, nearly whispering. There was no other sound in the room besides the moody crackle of the fire.

William’s façade slipped, panic shining through, but he kept his mouth shut.

Ethan sighed quietly, sounding almost disappointed. He stood, hands clasped behind his back. “You know, when I was in prison,” he said, as he began pacing around the fire, “I met a lot of bad guys. Murderers. Rapists. Human traffickers. The true scum of the earth had ended up accumulating there, and I was with them. I spent over a year with them. And I learned what bad men, men who have let their professions or obsessions take over their humanity, look like.” Ethan kept walking, not looking at their prisoner. Through his hands on his upper arms, Brandt could feel Williams begin to shake.

“I had a lot of time on my hands,” Ethan continued, “so I studied the men around me. I became an art critic of bad men, a connoisseur of devils’ faces, if you will. I know what true evil looks like.”

Ethan knelt in front of Williams, lasering in on his eyes. Williams, making no effort to hide his fear now, flinched back. Brandt held him fast, but could hardly blame him. Being on the receiving end of the look Ethan was giving him was something Brandt hoped he never experienced himself.

“You’re not a bad man, Williams,” Ethan said in the same soft tone. Brandt opened his mouth to question him–this was one of the men who had been playing Operation on him earlier, after all­–but Ethan silenced him with a look that said Trust me. “You’re not dark, not yet. I can see it in you still. You haven’t been in this game very long.” Ethan lowered his eyebrows in a question. “And since you’re not a bad man, you didn’t ask for this.” Ethan had leaned forward, opening his hands, relaxing his shoulders, and Brandt realized what he was doing. That was the body language of a man who was not a threat, a man looking for trust.

Ah. Not torture. Fear, followed by coercion. Brandt should have known Ethan would use a method to mess with people’s heads and draw out information without laying a finger on the one being interrogated.

“Which means,” Ethan continued, “that your employer, whoever that may be, has something on you. Leverage. Not threats to you yourself. If you were worried about self-preservation you wouldn’t have gone after IMF agents, who you and your employer clearly have enough information on to know what we are capable of. Which can only mean one other thing.” Ethan narrowed his eyes. “You have someone you need to protect.”

Williams broke at that. He sobbed and slumped in Brandt’s grip. “Please,” he gasped. “Please don’t. You can’t bring him into this.”

Ethan sighed again. He suddenly looked very tired. He rubbed his eyes. “It’s your little brother, isn’t it?”

Williams, still sobbing, nodded.

Brandt felt like he’d been kicked in the chest. Suddenly all he could see was Clint, his twin. See him chained to a wall somewhere as someone threatened him with Brandt’s life. He held down on the pain the image garnered and frowned at Ethan. “How did you know?”

Ethan looked at him with a sadness Brandt knew he would never show anyone outside of his team. “There were a lot of older brothers in that prison too, Brandt,” he murmured. 

“Please,” begged Williams again. “He’s the only family I have left. I have to look out for him.”

“Let him go,” sighed Ethan. Brandt released William’s arms but continued to kneel behind him guardedly.

Ethan sat cross-legged. “You need to tell us everything if we’re going to help you. What’s your first name?”

Williams sniffled. “Casper.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

Brandt’s eyebrows climbed. Though he could hear the honesty in the guy’s voice, backed up by the fact that lying wouldn’t do him any good at this point, he was still struck. Williams’–Casper’s– face was lined for his age, his eyes aged with weight. “You look a little older than twenty,” Brandt said skeptically.

“My parents died when I was seventeen,” Casper said. “My brother was thirteen. My mom worked for some bad people. My dad didn’t know. It got them both killed.” He wiped his nose, taking deep breaths. “I have no immediate family. After my parents died, the people my mom worked for basically told us to disappear. They said my mom was dead, so she never existed, and if we wanted to stay alive, neither could we.”

A tiny suspicion started to itch at the back of Brandt’s mind. He ignored it as Casper continued.

“They gave us plane tickets to London and we left. I lied about my age; we found a place to stay. I got Logan in school; I got a job. Things were okay.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Then in March this year, some people broke into our apartment. They kidnapped us and took us somewhere. It wasn’t London, I can tell you that much, but I still don’t know exactly who they are or where they’re based. Every time they sent me out they blindfolded me and dropped me off hours away. They all wore masks when they talked to me, gave me orders. I don’t know what they look like. If I wasn’t on a mission or training, I was in a cell. They never let me see my brother, but they told me he would suffer if I didn’t do what they wanted. I knew they could be lying, but I wasn’t going to take that chance. I couldn’t.”

“So they’re using your brother to blackmail you into doing what they want,” summed up Brandt. “Why you? You’re a kid. You’re not even legal drinking age in America. Why go to such lengths to get a freaking kid to work for you?”

Casper winced almost imperceptibly. “My mom,” he answered. “In the beginning they told me, before the training started, that they wanted revenge for what Agent Elena Williams had done to them three years ago. That’s all they told me. I still don’t know exactly how she died. I never saw her body, or my dad’s.”

But Brandt wasn’t listening. He had stiffened in shock and was staring at the kid in front of him, horrified. He looked up at Ethan and saw the same reaction plain on his face.

“Elena Williams?” asked Brandt, stunned. “Your mother was Elena Williams?”

Casper looked between him and Ethan, eyebrows wrinkling in confusion. “Yeah. Why?”

Ethan swallowed. “Because we knew her. She was one of us.”

“Casper,” said Brandt gently, “Your mom was an agent. She was IMF.”

The blood drained out of Casper’s face. “What?” he whispered.

Ethan nodded, his usually unflappable countenance suddenly drawn with sadness. “She was a field agent,” he said. “She died three years ago, right?” Casper nodded. “We went to her service. She was declared killed in action, but the body was never found, Casper. They buried an empty coffin. Your dad disappeared shortly after.” Casper glared at the floor, eyes brimming, but Ethan continued, uncharacteristically gentle. “He was never found either. The IMF monitored him, but he disappeared just two weeks after Elena was declared dead. We never found him. The reason you were never told the true circumstances of their deaths is because your mom was NOC. Deep, deep cover. Brandt was a chief analyst for years and he never even knew her status or missions. The bereaved aren’t told that kind of thing after their family member dies.” Ethan looked down. “They tried to give you a story right? About your mom and dad?”

Casper nodded again. “I could tell they were lying. When I asked they just repeated it. I never got the truth. About her, or my dad.” He fell back, then scoffed. He rubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes. “So they weren’t lying,” he said, his voice rough. “All this time I believed them, but there was still a part of me that wanted this whole thing to be a mistake.”

“Casper,” said Brandt. “Did they ever mention exactly what your mom did to them?”

Casper sniffed again. “No. They never told me the details. Just that Elena Williams had messed them up and hurt them. Nothing else.”

Brandt swore. “So we’re still at a dead end.”

Casper frowned. “What do you mean?”

“We don’t know who these people are either,” said Benji, loosening up and plopping down next to Brandt. “They blew up the plane Ethan was on. He survived. They came after him with mercenaries. He survived. Brandt and I and our teammate Jane were told Ethan was dead, but we came to the UK anyway to look for him.”

“We were captured in London,” said Brandt. “But we didn’t get a look at any of them. You and your friend with the electrodes are the first actual enemies I’ve seen all week.”

“Jurich wasn’t my friend,” snapped Casper, suddenly defensive. “He was my handler. He was there to make sure I didn’t mess up.”

“You seemed pretty upset when I knifed him,” said Ethan dryly.

“He’s the first face I’ve known in months,” Casper said. “And you startled me. But he wasn’t my friend. He threatened me constantly. That’s why I had to torture you, and act like I wanted to,” he said, turning to Brandt. “I’m really sorry about that, by the way.”

Despite the kid’s story, Brandt was still feeling a little hostile. “You didn’t have to do it.”

“Jurich didn’t threaten me,” snarled Casper, glaring at Brandt. “He threatened Logan. It was my little brother’s life at stake. What would you have done?”

Again Brandt saw Clint in his mind, and he couldn’t meet Casper’s eyes. “I would have done exactly what you did.”

For a moment the only sound was the hiss of the fire as Casper’s story sank in to all of them.

“There’s something you need to understand about these people,” Casper said lowly, looking at the ground. “They’re not in it for money, or power. They want revenge. They want to hurt people. My mom did something to them. I don’t know if it was them who really killed her and my dad, but they came after me and Logan to get back at her. If they want to kill Ethan, he must have hurt them too.”

“Why would they kill me and then go after my team?” asked Ethan. “If they wanted to hurt me they’d kill me last.”

“I don’t know,” said Casper. “But I do know this: you and everyone you’ve ever loved are in this now. I don’t know how they do it, but these people can find anyone. They found me and Logan. They found your team when they came to England. And they’re going to find you. They’ll kill you and then go after anyone you ever knew or worked with. No one who remembers you will be left alive. They will erase your memory from the world.”

Ethan had paled, and Brandt felt himself doing the same thing. “When you say everyone–“

Casper nodded, fear in his eyes. “I mean everyone.”


	9. Mustang

Jane Carter had to admit, she was pretty done with dealing with other peoples’ shit. 

It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected this kind of thing when she’d become an agent. She knew her average workday would feature kidnappings, terrorist plots, clichéd car chases and the occasional torture, where the most excitement in a “normal” person’s schedule would be a flat tire on the freeway. She’d known she would be hunted, exploited, objectified, and abandoned, and generally thrown into terrifying, potentially damaging situations on a daily basis. Of course she’d known. If she hadn’t, she would never have survived Cobalt. Hell, she wouldn’t have survived basic field training. She knew what it was like to take heat, of many kinds.

That being said, she was getting really tired of waking up tied to immovable objects.

She was secured with her back to a padded table with strong canvas straps tethering her ankles, wrists, and waist, but there was no strap on her forehead, which was something. Jane slowly opened her eyes.

There wasn’t much to see. A damp, dripping darkness. She lifted her head, which sent a red-hot spear of pain through the top of her skull to the base of her spine. Jane swallowed a moan. Okay, concussion. Awesome. She gently lowered herself back down and her body hummed from the jolt of agony.

Trying to alleviate the pounding in her head, Jane closed her eyes and sent her other senses out. She could hear a soft rustling somewhere beyond her cell door, like mice running over tile. The air was stale and stuffy and reeked of sweat, mildew and something colder–fear. And it didn’t move– at all. Not a flicker of breeze, no air currents from a person’s movement.

The realization hit her like a bat to the stomach.

She was underground.

Instantly Jane’s heart rate jacked up. Her palms started sweating. Every breath felt heavy in her chest, like the ceiling had fallen down, crushing her. The edges of her vision started to blur with panic as her entire body tingled with the need to get out. She clenched her teeth, trying to bring her terror under control.

She’d never told any other agent, not even her team. Field operators typically found themselves staking out in caves or scurrying through sewers–just look at when she and Benji broke Ethan out of prison–but she’d always had to force herself to do it. It usually required a twenty-minute look-in-the-mirror pep talk (or half a bottle of really good red wine and some reruns of Supernatural the night before), so by the time she was actually in the field her phobia wasn’t as much of a problem. It was always there, curdling in the back of her mind, adding a spark of panic to some of her movements, but she never let it impair her judgment or even show on her face when she was around the others. She could deal with it. She always had.

She’d had no such preparation this time.

Breathe, Jane. Breathe. She clenched her teeth in an attempt to bring herself under control. A whimper slipped past her lips.

God damn it. She was better than this. Pushing away the blind panic, she lifted her head again, this time welcoming the pain. Better pain than fear.

Beyond her feet was more darkness, but this bit of darkness featured a square of muddy yellow light at what she figured was head-height. A window, then. As her eyes adjusted, she saw hair-thin stripes of light outlining a tall rectangle. A door. She lowered her head back down and stared at the soupy blackness above her.

So, she was underground, in a room with a door and a window. How specific. Really narrowed it down.

Jane snarled lightly. The pain in her skull and the concussion-induced fog in her mind made it hard to think. She breathed in again and closed her eyes.

Use what you know. That’s what Ethan always told them. Go over what you now, isolate what you don’t, and act.

What did she know?

She was underground–trying not to think about the fact that she was underground–tied to a table. She had been unconscious for an unknown period of time, due to blunt force trauma to her skull. Before that, she had been with Brandt and Benji in Walter’s flat in London–

London. The answer clicked in her mind like a key in a lock. 

The catacombs beneath the city. Built under churches and cemeteries as a final resting place for the dead. Some had the capacity to hold thousands of coffins. Underground, limited in depth by the water table.

Well, that would explain the dripping she heard. And the damp and dark and, y’know, undergroundness–

Don’t think about it, Jane.

So, she could be in the London catacombs. It was likely. Even though she couldn’t be sure, it made her feel slightly less terrified to know she might know where she was.

As for what she didn’t know…

The list was overwhelming. Who had captured her. Where Benji and Brandt were. Where Walter was. If Ethan was even alive. If any of them were even still alive.

The idea that she was the last one standing scared her more than the weight of the rock above her. She swallowed the fear. She was an agent, and she was still alive. She had a job to do.

Use what you know, and act.

Before she could figure out exactly what to act on, a noise to her left made her freeze.

A scraping rattle, a cough–then a moan. And a familiar-sounding mutter.

Hope galvanized her. “Walter?” she whispered.

The rattle came again, chain against rock. “Jane? Thank God. I thought I was alone in this muggy little pit.”

Jane laughed weakly, sagging against the table. “Me too.” She could taste the relief, mingled with disappointment and fear. As glad as she was that she didn’t have to suffer through this alone, Walter’s presence meant another person she had to look out for. And shame–they had brought a civilian into this mess, and now he was in danger. Benji’s uncle, for God’s sake.

But then she remembered hazily that Walter had been an agent himself. Maybe having him here would give them each a fighting chance.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

Walter rattled again in the darkness. “I got a bit of a bump on the head, but I don’t think it will be too much of a problem. These old bones are stronger than they look. You?”

“Same,” Jane answered. “Monitor yourself, and let me know if it gets worse.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Walter chuckled. “Don’t worry about me, Jane. This is not the first time I’ve woken up chained to a wall.”

“You’re chained?” asked Jane, an idea kindling. “What else?”

“Ummm…” she heard him moving around, running his hands over the walls. “I can’t quite see, but it seems I’m in a small room. Rock walls, wet. Chains on my wrists and ankles attached to four metal rings on the wall behind me.”

“Are we in the same room?”

Walter was silent, then– “I haven’t the foggiest. We could be, or there could be a grating between us. I can’t reach you, the chains are a wee bit short.”

Jane blew out a breath. “Right. No hope of you getting over here and undoing these restraints, then.”

She could almost feel him frown. “You mean you’re not chained?”

“No, I’m strapped to a table.”

“Oh, dear. That would make it more difficult.”

Jane raised an eyebrow arbitrarily. “You sound pretty calm for a man who just got kidnapped from his own apartment.”

“Like I said Janie, not the first time.” Walter sounded almost gleeful. “In fact, it’s nice to be back in the thick of things. Retirement can be frightfully boring.”

A noise came from the direction of the door– footsteps, heavy and deliberate. Jane tensed. The door moaned open, dirty yellow light inundating the room. She flinched, her eyes throbbing.

She had a split-second view of a dark figure darting up to her before something dark and scratchy was thrown over her face. Burlap.

Jane’s entire body seized as panic again rose in her throat.

She could deal with being tied up. She could deal with being blind. She could even deal with being underground. But all three at once had her pushing the edge of hysteria. She squirmed, probably not very subtly, against her bonds, trying to give an outlet to her fear.

A cold hand clamped over wrist. She froze.

“Don’t struggle,” came a quiet whisper from her right. “They’ll just hit you harder.”

Jane didn’t try to keep the surprise off her face–it wasn’t like anyone could see it. The speaker sounded cautious, quiet, surreptitious, and unmistakably young. Not exactly what she had been expecting.

The hand left her wrist, and the speaker started setting something up next to her judging by the sounds, but Jane couldn’t discern exactly what.

“Where am I?” she asked, quiet and careful. “Who are you?”

Silence, save the sounds of whatever he was creating. Jane could feel Walter away to the side, listening attentively. She could also sense the tension in the air, the apprehension of whoever had hoodwinked her. Fear, when handled badly, was a weakness. Perhaps one she could use to her advantage. 

Jane let her tone lose some of its earlier edge. “Who is ‘they’?” she asked. “How do you know they don’t like it when you squirm?” More silence. Jane’s voice dropped. “Did they hit you harder when you squirmed?”

A tiny catch of breath next to her. A flash of triumph at her perception warred with sympathy–she’d been hoping she was wrong. Still, perhaps there was a window there. Maybe he knew the lay of the land. If they could work together to get out of here…

Voice soft, she asked, “What’s your name?”

Pain like a shard of lightning stabbed itself into the crook of her elbow. Surprise made her hiss even as dread boiled in her stomach. She knew that pain– a needle. What the hell had he just injected her with?

“Jane?” Walter called, panicked, breaking the silence. “Are you all right? What did he do?”

“I’m fine, Walter,” she said, but her words were slurring. Sedatives. Fantastic. Pretty powerful, but the way the edges of her thought began to blur. She struggled to hold on to consciousness, but the drugs tied weights to her mind and threw it into the sea.

Just before she went under, the bag was taken off her face. She took in a patch of dark skin and curly hair as her eyes slid shut. Warm breath on her cheek as he whispered, “Logan.”

Name. His name is Logan. Hope was the last thing Jane felt before reality sank away.

()()()

The first clear thought in her mind was: I’m awake.

The next was I’m still underground.

She felt the press of the rock above her as distinctly as the faint throb still muttering in her temples. Panic. She pushed it down and opened her eyes.

It was still dark, but not the tangible darkness of before. There were bars on both her sides, and a wall out in front. She could see her hand in front of her face when she lifted it–

Jane started upright. She wasn’t on the table anymore. Her back was against a cold, hard surface, but her legs were out in front of her, and her arms were free. She brought a hand to her temple and felt flakes of dried blood fall from her hair.

Clink. Chain slithered on the ground next to her as she moved. Her hands were secured separately with heavy metal cuffs, which were attached to the wall by thick chain. Jane scoffed. How medieval.

She cast out her senses. The water-sound of before was gone. The room was silent save the faint huff of her breath. Her stomach dropped.

“Walter?”

Silence.

In desperation, she called, “Logan?”

More silence– then, to her left, a swish of fabric on fabric.

She grabbed it, trying not to let her panic bleed into her voice. “Logan, are you there?”

More swishing, then through the diluted dark she saw two pale brown hands wrap around the bars to her left. A thin, dirty face and two luminous eyes that caught the faint light in the room followed. “You’re awake,” whispered Logan.

Jane let her head fall back on the wall in relief. “Yeah, I’m awake,” she said, copying his soft tone. “Thanks for not leaving me alone down here.”

Logan was silent, but she could feel his gaze, the intensity of his listening. On guard.

A question that had been prodding her since she’d first heard his voice escaped Jane’s lips. “Logan, how old are you?”

Logan hesitated. Then, quietly: “Ten.”

Jane’s mouth fell open. Ten? Ten? Awesome. She was captured, chained to a wall, and her only assets were a senior ex-agent currently MIA and a tweenager who probably hadn’t even had the Talk yet. She was screwed.

Jane breathed out, regaining her composure. Time to begin. If they were going to get out of here alive, she couldn’t coddle this kid.

“Logan, do you know who I am?”

“Yes. You’re an IMF agent.”

“That’s right.” Jane shifted slightly, looking into his eyes. “And do you know what that means? What I do?”

“You kill people.”

Jane couldn’t stop the catch in her breath the boy’s words incurred. She stuffed the ever-present guilt that flared up back into its hole to be dealt with later and pressed on. “I have killed people, yes. But believe me, Logan, I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Then why do you do it?” His voice was so flat, emotionless, yet it demanded an answer.

Jane’s voice caught in her throat. She’d never really asked herself before. Not in such a point-blank way.

Why did she kill?

She didn’t enjoy it. She hated it. She hated the fact she had to kill. She didn’t become an agent to slake some primal bloodlust. She knew some agents who had, and she’d secretly always detested them. That was one of the reasons she got along with her team so well. Benji took so long to pass the field exam because he didn’t think he’d be able to take another person’s life in the line of duty. Brandt killed in self-defense, or in the defense of others. Jane also suspected he killed out of fear of the consequences if he didn’t kill. Inaction burdened him for five years with the needless guilt of Julia Hunt’s “murder”. And Ethan hated it most of all of them–which was darkly ironic, seeing as how he was the oldest, most experienced agent among them. Jane couldn’t imagine how many people had come to their ends by Ethan’s hand, either deliberately or indirectly. But she, Brandt and Benji all knew he abhorred the killing. Abhorred it to his bones. He’d never outright said it, but she had seen the guilt and self-hatred in his eyes whenever the conversation went that way, on the rare, rare occasions their team leader ever opened up to them.

Yet she knew Ethan would kill, again and again until his hands were stained irrevocably, in order to preserve that which he loved. And he loved them, his team. For all his intensity, his frequent coldness and borderline scariness, Jane was sure of that.

The answer fell into her mind like a pebble into a reflecting pool. Jane grinned to herself. How was it her team always helped her figure it out? Well, that was why they were her team, she guessed.

“I kill because there are people in this world I love, Logan,” she said. “And they are constantly in danger. I kill to keep them safe. I kill because there are people I need to protect.” She met his eyes, or what she hoped were his eyes. “Does that make sense?”

Logan was still. Jane sensed he was mulling over her words. Coming to a decision.

“Yeah, it does make sense,” he said finally. “You’re like Lieutenant Hawkeye. She told Winry she killed people to protect someone– Colonel Mustang.”

Jane’s eyes widened. “You like Fullmetal Alchemist?” Another secret she’d never shared with her boys–she’d never really grown out of her anime phase. Hey, everyone needed something to take the edge off reality. Never thought it might be useful on a mission, though.

Logan nodded emphatically, his face suddenly lighting up. “Oh, yeah! Just Brotherhood, though. The first anime sucks.”

“Definitely,” she agreed. “I’m with you. I cried at the end, when Ed gets stuck in that other world, so far from home.”

Logan went quiet. “Like you. You’re far from home, aren’t you?”

Jane’s smile faded. “Yeah, Logan. I’m trying to get back. Because for me, my team, those people I need to protect? They’re home.”

Logan shifted again, settling against the bars. He said nothing, but Jane could feel his pensiveness.

“My big brother is home for me, then. I guess,” he said suddenly, almost desperately. “He was here, but they took him away. I want him to come back. We had to travel a lot, and he told me to pretend I was Al, and he was Ed. We’d stick together no matter what, protect each other. But they took him away.” Jane could hear the tears in his voice now. “They took him away. I want him back.” He slumped against the bars, sobbing almost soundlessly.

“So let’s go find them,” Jane said fiercely. “We both have people we need to get home to, Logan. Let’s get out of here and find them.”

“I’ve tried,” whimpered Logan. “They catch me. They always catch me.”

“But you’re not alone now,” said Jane. ‘Together. We can get out of here, Logan. We can get home.” She shuffled over to the bars, where the crying boy was curled in misery. She touched his shackled hand gently through the bars. “What do you say?”

Logan looked up. His cheeks were wet. Jane didn’t think she’d never seen such manifest despair.

“We’ve got to fight,” she whispered, distantly realizing tears of her own were falling down her face. “We’ve got to fight for who we love. Together, we can make it out of here. We can make it home.”

Logan didn’t move. Then, slowly, he closed his small, grimy hand around Jane’s own. He looked into her eyes, and Jane saw a fire there. Anger– and hope.

“Don’t call me Logan,” he said. “Only my brother calls me that.”

Jane sniffled. “Okay. What should I call you?”

Logan looked momentarily puzzled, like he hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t know.”

Jane thought, then smiled. “You’re a spy now. You need a codename anyway. How about this– I’m Hawkeye. You’re Mustang.”

A young smile, so out of place in all the fear and misery around them, lit the boy’s features. “Mustang. Okay. I like it.” He quirked his eyebrows, and for a moment Jane thought she saw in his expression a youthful, innocent need for someone bigger than him to make it all okay again. “Wait…if I’m Mustang, and you’re Hawkeye…does that mean you’ll protect me?”

Jane secretly bit her lip, not taking her eyes off the boy. Her training told her, probably truthfully, that this was a bad idea, a liability, that becoming invested in this boy would get them all killed. But in her treacherous soul she knew she would never be able to leave this boy behind in any sense. She would get him back to his brother, no matter what.

Jane nodded. “We get out of here together, or not at all,” she said. “I’ll protect you, Mustang. It’s a promise.” Logan–Mustang– grinned tentatively. She grinned back.

And tried to silence the voice in the back of her mind whispering, _Don’t make promises you know you can’t keep._


	10. Regroup

Benji was faring surprisingly well, given that only a few hours before he’s had a tiny bad-trip bomb glued to his sternum, Ethan had been resurrected, Brandt had reappeared, and the three of them were now on the lamb with an effing teenager.

Well. Casper was twenty, but still.

Benji wrapped his hands tighter around his ribs as a draft of chilly England air snuck around the makeshift barrier they’d strung in front of the shattered window. The fabric tore loose a little. Brandt cursed softly, rose from where he sat beside the fire, and went to adjust it. After Casper’s spill-all, Ethan had gone silent for a long time. He stared pensively into their feeble fire while Brandt and Casper stripped the remaining upholstery and used the fabric to block out the coming cold. Winters in the UK swallow the short days quickly, as Benji well knew, and night had been marshalling by the time Casper awoke and spoke to them. Besides, they were all too exhausted and hurt to storm any mysterious enemy facilities right away. Ethan ruled they would recuperate for the night, before Casper led them to the base in the morning.

Which led to now: waiting. Benji’s least favorite part of any mission. Not that he wasn’t used to it– manning most ops behind a computer screen made for a high capacity for nail-biting– but he could almost taste the tension vibrating in the air. He couldn’t think about Walter or Jane without a vortex of nausea opening in his stomach.

“Ethan.” Brandt’s voice was unusually soft as he returned to the fireside. Ethan was leaning against one of the dusty, mouse-gnawed chairs they’d dragged over for some semblance of comfort; he looked up at Brandt but did not speak.

“Let me have a look at your back. And your arm.”

“I’m okay, Brandt,” Ethan replied, but they could all hear the tiredness in his voice. “I self-treated already.”

Brandt didn’t move. “Was that before or after you ran in here and raised hell, no doubt ripping scabs in the process?”

Ethan just huffed a little. Benji remarked internally how unusual this was: Ethan sitting on the floor, with Brandt standing over him. Usually Ethan was all focus and motion and intensity. He liked to meet both friends and enemies at eye level. The fact that he didn’t stir now was all the confirmation Brandt seemed to need. He knelt with an answering huff and dragged Ethan’s pilfered ditch bag closer to them.

“Brandt,” Ethan murmured, a little more forcefully now. “We should save the medical supplies. We’re going to need them again.”

Brandt just opened the bag and removed a gallon Ziploc full of various first aid implements. “Calm down. It’s not like I’m stapling you.”

“Brandt–“

Brandt sat back on his heels and fixed Ethan with a look of such unusual and indignant protectiveness that Benji almost gaped.

“Fuck off, Hunt,” Brandt said, in a tone that garnered no further argument. “You were dead, god damn it. You’ve been blown up and shot at. You’re no damn good to the rest of us or yourself if you lose strength over something avoidable. Now let me see your back.”

For a moment Ethan gazed back levelly. Even now, after all this time, Benji could never quite tell what Ethan was thinking when he gave someone that look. He wondered if he was going to actually fight Brandt on this one. Next to him, Casper audibly swallowed.

Then Ethan sighed. Some of the iron went out of his shoulders, and suddenly Benji could see a new weight on him that hadn’t been there before he left the U.S. He promised himself right then and there that if they survived this mess, he was getting his whole ridiculous team together, making them play Call of Duty until their eyes fell out, then getting everyone, himself included, drunk enough to not feel pain for three days. God knows they’d have earned it after this steaming heap of rubbish.

Ethan started working his jacket off, but hissed when he raised his arm. Brandt took his hands and pushed them town. “Hold still, dumbass. Let me.” Brandt gently removed Ethan’s jacket and inner thermals, then gently peeled off his shirt.

Despite himself, Benji let out a soft hiss. It wasn’t the worst he’d seen on Ethan– not by far– but it was ugly. Ethan’s shoulder was swollen and mottled with bruising. A long, narrow cut ran the length of his forearm, and his right shoulder blade and at least half his back was burned. Not life-threatening, maybe, but still very susceptible to infection and quite painful.

Brandt snorted. “Self-treated, my ass. You’ve barely touched this.”

“Had other…things on my mind at the time. Like running for my life.” Now that Ethan had conceded to Brandt’s attention, all the remaining fight seemed to go out of him, and he leaned almost bonelessly against the chair. He barely flinched when Brandt inspected his shoulder unit.

“Well, good news is, you didn’t dislocate it, for once,”  
Brandt murmured. “Looks like a bad strain. The burns are more concerning. Are these from the crash?” Ethan nodded, long hair falling into his eyes. Brandt removed a tube of antibiotic ointment from the Ziploc. “I think the saltwater helped clean it out initially, but I’m still worried about infection. And they won’t be able to scab properly as we keep moving around, so the deeper ones are going to scar. Not that you probably care at this point.” Ethan tilted his head in silent concession. Benji had seen Ethan shirtless before, in situations like this. He knew how Ethan’s body was a physical record of almost all his missions. To Ethan, this would just be an addition to the grim history.

Brandt started laying a thin layer of gauze over the burns. “They won’t heal great, but this’ll help with the contact pain,” he said. He taped off the pad. “Arm. Now.”

Ethan shifted so he faced Brandt. He offered his cut forearm. Brandt disinfected the wound, then threaded a needle and started stitching. Ethan didn’t react, other than to hang his head in tiredness. His forehead dipped lower and lower until Brandt finally rolled his eyes and gently pulled Ethan forward so his head rested on Brandt’s shoulder even as he kept stitching. A hidden tension seeped from Ethan’s battered frame, and he relaxed into Brandt. Brandt hummed a little.

Benji couldn’t help but smirk softly, more in fondness than judgment. It underscored Ethan’s exhaustion that he let his walls down like this in front of Casper, a stranger. Benji had only seen him do it a few times before– critically injured, or in the apartment back in D.C., on some of the nights when the four of them stayed up drinking and talking into the wee hours. Ethan had fallen asleep on Brandt like this once then. It made Benji glad to know they’d grown to trust each other so fully, even after everything. He didn’t want or need to know the details of Croatia, but he could tell it wasn’t as bad as he had been formally led to believe. He almost didn’t recognize Brandt the next time he saw him after Seattle. There was a new uplift in his stance, less gravity in his voice, like a profound darkness had been exorcised from him. 

Brandt tied off the last stitch, then shifted gently. “Ethan.”

Ethan mumbled irritably and didn’t move. Brandt sighed longsufferingly and motioned to Benji to throw him a clean sweatshirt. Benji did, and Brandt pulled it gently over Ethan’s torso. “Come on, you big baby,” he chided, low and gentle, and guided Ethan off his shoulder and into the most comfortable position on the floor he could manage with no padding and several injuries. Ethan settled in, but then grunted and grasped at Brandt’s hands.

“Wake…wake me for..watch,” he slurred, words heavy with sleep.

Brandt patted Ethan’s wrist. “Yeah right, team leader. Go to bed. We’re good.”

Ethan seemed at least vaguely satisfied by this. He let go of Brandt’s hands and curled into a half-fetal position. His eyes fluttered shut.

Brandt sighed heavily. He slumped some, and the firelight caught on the blood still caked around his lips and temples.

“Brandt,” Benji said, motioning him over. “C’mon, lad. Your turn.”

Brandt didn’t protest. He picked up the medical supplies and shuffled closer to Benji.

Benji inspected his face. Bruises, yes, but he was more worries about the welt on the back of Brandt’s skull. “Concussion?” Benji asked.

Brandt grimaced. “Probably a mild one. I should be okay to sleep, though.” Benji fished out a bottle of higher-strength painkillers and shook two pills into Brandt’s open palm. Brandt dry-swallowed them.

“Do I need to take your shirt off?” asked Benji. Brandt’s shirtfront was bloodstained under his unzipped jacket, but he thought it was mostly from the cuts on his face.

“Nah,” Brandt said. “They shocked me a bunch, sure, but I think it’s just welts. I’ll baby them when this whole thing is over with.”

“Right.” Benji started to clean the cuts on Brandt’s face. Brandt hissed a little at the cold touch of peroxide, but other than that, stayed still.

“I’m really sorry.”

Benji looked up. Casper’s eyes stayed on the fire, even as he spoke again. “I didn’t want to do those things to you. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I really didn’t. I’m sorry.” His eyes were too hooded and haunted in a face so young, and Benji felt a sudden spike of rage at the nature of the world to break such innocent things.

“It’s okay, Casper.” Brandt’s voice was unusually soft. “We’ve all done much worse. None of us can hold it against you. We do what we have to do to protect the ones we care about.”

Casper sniffed. He looked up at the two of them. “Is that why you’re here? To protect what you care about?”

Brandt’s eyes cut to Ethan, and softened. Benji looked over to find their fearless team leader, the man he had seen dangle outside the tallest building in the world and barely bat an eyelid, curled up on the floor, head pillowed on his bicep, dark hair falling over his face. He looked, abruptly, very young. A warm affection overcame Benji, and he sent another silent thank-you to whatever gods were listening that the Secretary was wrong and that Ethan really was here, alive, and coming home.

Well. If they made it out of this mess.

“Yeah,” murmured Brandt. “That’s why we’re here at all. He’d do the same for us too.”

Casper pulled his knees to his chest and rested his chin atop them. He looked thoughtfully over at Ethan. “Why are they doing this to you? To him?”

“We all have a lot of enemies,” Benji said, cleaning up the last cut on Brandt’s face. “Ethan especially. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.”

“And probably won’t be the last,” Brandt grunted.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Casper looked back to the fire. “Go into hiding somewhere. Disappear. I hear spies are good at that.” There was a touch of bitterness in his voice.

“Well, we could,” Brandt replied. “But we won’t. These fuckers have your brother, and almost certainly have Jane and Benji’s uncle. Besides, the fact that they’re coming after Ethan specifically suggests that something bigger might be going on here. We need to figure out what.” He gave Benji a side-eye. “Not that this is, of course, sanctioned.”

Benji shrugged. While a few years ago the thought of doing disavowal-worthy moves in the field would have nauseated him, they just seemed a weekly occurrence now. Occupational hazard of being on Ethan Hunt’s team, he supposed.

“Well,” he said, putting away the medical supplies, “I’m sure they’re dispatching a separate team to investigate the cause of the explosion in the jet. Given Ethan’s body trail, we may all end up intersecting at the end of this…whatever it is. And if not, I’m sure the Secretary will appreciate the information anyway. That is, if we all come home alive and all that.”

Brandt groaned softly as he settled against a couch. “Yeah, there’s that.” He rested a hand softly on Ethan’s shoulder. It was a testament to their team leader’s exhaustion that he barely stirred at the contact, tensing momentarily before relaxing into Brandt’s hand. Brandt smirked.

“There’s that, but we’ll be okay,” Benji asserted. It was always his job to be the hopeful, cheerful one. Ethan’s intense, optimistic single-mindedness, Brandt’s cool, detachable realism, Jane’s relentless but good-hearted practicality, and him. They were all wildly different, and somehow it worked.

“We’ll figure it out,” Benji said. And he believed it. “We will. We always do.”

“Yeah,” Brandt murmured. His eyes were in the fire and his thoughts seemed far away.

The wind gnawed at the covering over the broken window. Night crept on toward morning.


	11. Advance

Ethan woke as he usually did– with a jolt and a spike of adrenaline. Several things registered at once: the smell of something burning, a dull ache in his shoulder, and a gentle, warm pressure against his back. He shifted up and looked around.

Tepid dawn-light was creeping through the covered-up window. Casper was asleep on the floor, and Benji was sitting awake in a chair with his back to the fire, which had burned down to cold char. The pressure on his back was Brandt, who had curled up into a tight ball and somehow wedged his upper shoulders and head against Ethan. Ethan couldn’t help it– he snorted at the sight.

The sound drew Benji’s attention. “Oh, good, you’re up, Ethan. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“What time is it?” asked Ethan, sitting up and rubbing a hand over his face. His injuries felt better than before Brandt had treated them, but they still throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

“Around seven,” Benji replied.

“You didn’t wake me for watch,” Ethan accused.

“No, we didn’t.” There was absolutely no contrition in Benji’s voice. Clearly Brandt had been rubbing off on him. Ethan sighed and decided he had too little energy to argue.

“Any disturbances?”

“Nothing,” Benji said. “Except Brandt snoring.”

Speaking of. Ethan twisted and poked Brandt on the shoulder. “Time to go, Madonna,” he said loudly.

Whether it was the poking or the use of his nickname– a gleeful byproduct of his shower-singing habit that he was still in denial about the rest of the team knowing– Brandt sat up with a snarl. Ethan smirked. “We’re going to battle. Care to join us?”

They packed up in less than a minute and crept out through the empty house with guns drawn. Just because they hadn’t had any trouble through the night didn’t mean their enemies had not caught up to them and were lying in wait. The wind gusting through the open front door was violently cold.

But the passage was empty, and they reached the SUV without being seen. Ethan gave the engine– and his teammates– a few minutes to warm up. The hot blast of the heater revived his tired mind better than caffeine. He started to think.

He knew this was a trap. Taking Jane and Benji’s uncle was pretty blatant. He knew he was being toyed with, moved around on a chessboard by someone who had more information than they did. He had been in this position before, most memorably in ’96. Only then he knew within the first ten minutes of seeing Jim alive that he was the traitor. But he still hated feeling used.

This was even worse. It wasn’t just him this time, running rogue with the only objective to clear his name and come home, even though he had little to come home to. This time the lives of his team hung in the balance. He wouldn’t be able to handle losing them.

The risk unsettled him. This wasn’t just another mission. They were always in danger, yes, but this time it was because of him. Someone had come after him, and now they were all in the crosshairs, and few things were more effective at making Ethan feel out of control.

“We can’t just go barging in there,” Brandt said from the passenger’s seat, as if he had heard Ethan’s ruminations.

“No, we can’t.”

“So what’s the play?” Brandt scratched behind his ear, an agitated tic that Ethan knew even field training hadn’t broken of him.

Ethan let out a breath. “What can you tell us about where we’re going, Casper?”

Casper met his eyes in the rearview. “They covered my head when we left,” he replied. “They brought in your team from London. I saw them take Benji, Jane and Walter away, but they brought me with Brandt. Jurich left from there and didn’t stop until we got to this house. Like I said, he covered my head when we left, but I think we drove for about a couple hours. I don’t know what direction though, I’m sorry.”

“I know where we’re going,” Ethan said. “They left a navigation line on their GPS in this thing.”

“Then it’s definitely a trap,” Brandt deadpanned.

“I know it’s a trap, which is why I need more information,” Ethan said. “Casper?”

Casper gnawed his lip. “I haven’t seen it from the outside,” he started. “But I think it’s underground. It’s like these long brick tunnels. It smells damp.”

“Catacombs,” Benji and Ethan said in unison.

“The Catacombs of London,” Benji continued. “People used them as shelters during the Blitz. There’s miles and miles of them.”

“What else do you remember?” Ethan prompted.

Casper was looking increasingly nervous, but he said, “It’s a series of rooms, off one central tunnel. I think the way in is through a basement in a church, because they would cover my face whenever we went in or out but sometimes I could hear a choir singing.”

“There’s some Deep Web conspiracy theories that a church in central London uses the catacombs for human trafficking,” Benji piped up. “Altar boys and such.”

“There anything to it?” asked Brandt.

“Well, it’s mostly rubbish, but there was an expose done around five years ago, I think? Apparently there was a priest who had kidnapped a couple children and hid them under his church.” Benji grimaced. “He’d, um…use the singing during mass to cover the screaming when he…well. One of the poor kids escaped, turned him in. Bastard’s in jail until Judgment Day. But of course that’s where the theories started.”

“It would make sense,” Casper said. “The rooms where the kept us weren’t real cells or anything. Just brick rooms with big heavy doors and guards. Maybe the priest put them there.”

“So we need to sneak into a church,” Brandt summed up, “and then find some way into the secret entrance under it, without being noticed by the guards that are definitely waiting for us.” Brandt rubbed a hand over his crew cut and scratched behind his ear again. “Awesome.”

“Or we just find another way into the Catacombs,” Ethan said. He yanked the parking break off and started guiding the SUV back to the road.

“Like what?” asked Brandt.

Ethan raised an eyebrow pointedly.

From the backseat, Benji groaned. “Oh, come– no, not this again!”

“What?” asked Brandt and Casper in unison.

Ethan just rolled his eyes and cursed his luck. He’d never hear the end of this one.

()()()

  
“Gotta say,” Brandt gagged, “I’m an IMF agent, yes. This is in my job description, yes.” Through the flashlight beam, he fixed Ethan with a frosty glare. “But I really hate you right now, Ethan.”

“Oh, piss off, Brandt,” Benji grumbled. “You should’ve been there when we broke him out of prison. Russian sewage smells even worse than English, and that’s quite a feat.”

“You weren’t even in the sewer that time, Benji,” Ethan protested, as he picked his way around an island of questionable origin, leaning on the brick ribs of the sewage tunnel for balance. He shone the flashlight beam further down the sewer. By his calculations– and considerable guesswork– they should be getting close.

“No, but I could smell it on you and Jane for hours afterward,” Benji said.

“You were in prison?” Casper asked him. “What’d you do?”

“Long story for a later time.” The last thing he wanted to get into right now was Cobalt, or the events that led up to that whole disaster. He thought suddenly of Julia. He’d managed to conclude (after several minutes of silent but frantic calculating) that whoever had Jane and Walter couldn’t know about her. Only two people left on Earth knew that she was still alive, and he’d personally made sure that her tracks were so well covered and her new identity so thorough that even the most dedicated stalker, hacker, or hunter would be thrown off the scent. Despite Casper’s warning, he had to believe that she was safe and sound and far away from all of this. He would lose his mind otherwise.

He had more than enough to worry about right here and now.

The beam of his light ghosted over a break in the wall of the sewer, where the color and pattern of the bricks changed for about a twenty-foot gap. Bingo.

“This is it,” Ethan said. They gathered around the gap. “Everyone solid on the plan plan from here?”

“You mean the crippling lack thereof?” Asked Brandt. “Yeah, feel good in that regard.” Ethan glared at him, and Brandt cleared his throat awkwardly. “We’re ready, Ethan.”

Ethan nodded. He set his shoulder a little tighter. “I just want you all to remember.’ We’re on our own. Anything that happens from now on will, most likeluy, never reach the official echelons of the IMF, and if it does, it won’t stay long. Therefore, you may use any means necessary, sanctioned or otherwise, to accomplish this objective. We’re going to get Jane, Walter, and Casper’s brother out of here, and out whothese people are and why they’re after us. We will neutralize the threat and go the hell home. Clear?”

A series of solemn nods. Benji muttered something under his breath.

“What was that, Benji?” Ethan asked. “I didn’t catch it.”

“Oh, it’s just–“ Benji blushed. “Sedona. It’s something Walter told me, that his team leader used to carry a picture of her daughter, Sedona, for hope and lick n missions.” He blushed deeper. “Just thought it would help.”

Ethan grinned softly. “We’ll take whatever you got, Benji.”

Then he lifted the sledgehammer and started attacking the wall.

The hammer was brand new (they’d bought in in a hardware store in London right before ditching the SUV and crawling into the sewer), and of good make, and the brick started to crumble quickly.

 _Well, if they didn’t know we were here already, they do now, Ethan_ thought. _Nothing for it._ He swung until his damaged shoulder started screaming in protest, than handed it over to Brandt. Little by little, the bricks grew more and more unstable. Chinks of light started to appear.

Finally, a huge chunk went. Then another, and another. The bricks fell away to reveal an empty space, illuminated harshly by industrial white light. Brandt paused and listened, but they heard nothing. He widened the hole more until it was large enough to admit each of them. Then he stepped back.

Ethan nodded. He drew his gun and ducked into the opening.

He emerged into a long, foul-smelling hallway. It was entirely empty. He waited for others to come through. When they all joined him, Casper gestured in one direction, and they started moving forward silently.

They rounded the first bend in the hall.

And stopped dead.


	12. Thieves Must be Punished

Shit, thought Brandt. Shit, shit, shit.

Jane and Walter were side by side. They were kneeling, their hands behind their backs, clothes torn and faces bruised. Duct tape covered their mouths. Six black-clothed men in masks stood behind them, each with a silenced pistol aimed at the backs of Jane and Walters' heads.

For a sharp, silent moment, no one moved or spoke.

Then, from a side tunnel, another two men emerged, dragging a small figure between them.

Casper made a choking noise and tensed beside Brandt. "Logan," he called, desperation heavy in his words.

The figure raised his head. He looked like a younger version of his brother, but his eyes were less heavy. His mouth was also taped.

Jane's head was down. Blood matted the side of her face, and she didn't stir at their entrance. Walter's eyes met Brandt's. They were blazing with anger– and warning.

"Good afternoon, Agent Hunt."

The disembodied voice that thrummed through the tunnel seemed to bleed out of the brick itself. Brandt scanned for hidden speakers and failed to find any. Voice distortion, well-hidden cameras– these people were nothing if not committed to their anonymity.

The tension in Ethan's frame was his only tell, a stress reaction that Brandt only saw because he knew to look for it. His face was perfectly calm, though, as was his voice when he spoke.

"And to whom do I owe the pleasure?" He was looking right at Jane and Walter, and Brandt could almost see the gears turning even as he himself tried to formulate a way out of here.

"That is an introduction for a later time," the speaker replied. "And that is for your knowledge only. That brings us, conveniently, to our next point: come with us willingly, Agent Hunt, and we will release your friends. Refuse to do so, and we will shoot them in the skull, starting with the boy."

The masked guards yanked Logan closer to them and forced him to his knees, nestling the muzzle of the silenced pistol against the base of his skull. Casper cried out and lunged forward. Brandt grabbed him and yanked him back and circled his chest with his arms.

"Control your companions, or we will expedite the process," the voice said. "Or perhaps we will simply reinforce the gravity of your situation."

The gun behind Logan's head was cocked with a click.

"Wait." Ethan's voice was still deadly calm, but Brandt could hear the fear in it. And the resolve.

"Ethan, no," Brandt muttered. No. No. Not again.

Ethan turned to him, and for the first time since meeting him Brandt could see in his eyes the weight of all he knew. "Tell me there's another way," he said softly.

And suddenly they were back there again, the hot bite of desert air on his skin. And again Brandt felt the horrible, undeniable grip of reality– that there was no other way. And Ethan knew it.

Yet somehow, this time, it was worse. The world didn't hang in the balance now, and yet, this was worse.

Brandt reached out and gripped Ethan's wrist. He pitched his voice low enough that he hoped the others could not hear.

"You come back," he said, looking Ethan dead in the eye, cradling that heavy certainty between them. "You find a way. Come back to us."

Ethan looked back at him. And then he nodded slow. "I will," he said. "I promise."

Brandt released him.

Ethan straightened. "Untie Jane and Walter," he said. "Let the boy go. Let them pass. You will show me their safe release into the city. You will deliver them to the address they provide. I will watch all this on a body camera on one of your men. Only then will I come with you. If not, everyone will come away from here bloody, on the low chance they come away at all. Are we clear?"

There was a beat of silence. Then: "Release the prisoners. Do as he has said."

The masked men threw Logan to the ground. He sprang up and ran toward them. Brandt released Casper, who ran forward and grabbed his brother. Something loosened in Brandt's chest, despite their situation.

Walter went next. As soon as his hands were free, he reached up and ripped off the duct tape over his mouth. A low curse followed. He stood, throwing off the lingering hands of his captors in disgust.

"You all need to be taught a lesson about how to treat your elders," he spat, kneeling and undoing Jane's bonds. She shifted at that, glassy brown eyes sliding open and widening slightly when they fixed on the figures across the room. Walter helped her stand slowly. Benji rushed forward and helped them both across the room.

"We are waiting, Agent Hunt."

Ethan turned to them. "Go to Obsidian Site. Protocol Cicada."

Benji nodded once, sharply. "Ethan…"

"Make sure the brothers get taken care of," he continued. "Then rendezvous at 23 hundred tonight. Location Shakespeare." He dropped his voice. "I have a hunch. Let me see it through. Benji, Brandt, get Jane, Walter, and the boys safe. Take care of each other." He gave them all a quick grin, and Brandt could almost ignore the knot of utter dread in his gut. "See you guys later."

Then Ethan turned away from them, and crossed the room. The masked men flanked him and led him away into the dark.

000

The captors kept their word. Brandt and the others were led out of the Catacombs by another side tunnel, then up through a series of stairs and into the interior of a church. The smell of candles and old wood punched the reek of mold out of Brandt's head. Judging by the light coming through the stained glass, it was nearing sunset.

The black-clad men left them at the door, where a tint-windowed SUV was waiting. Only one joined them, to keep the promise of the body camera, presumably. The driver was also masked. They wound through the rush-hour streets of London to the Obsidian Site, a safehouse Brandt knew of but had never himself seen. Like with most IMF outposts, it was simple and subtle and fronted, in this case, a functioning laundry.

They emerged from the SUV, and the car disappeared into the traffic. Brandt took Jane's arm around his shoulders as she started to sway.

He released a breath, then looked to Benji. "You followed Cicada protocol, right?"

Benji smirked tiredly. "Driver, car and the guard that came with us are all bugged. Already transmitting to the screens inside and Yusef at headquarters."

Brandt nodded. They made their way through the laundry to the back stock room, where Benji tripped the access housing and entered his information and retinal scan. A false wall in the stockroom slid open, revealing the safehouse. It was standard-issue, a mission field house with provisions, medical supplies, and a series of bunks.

They settled in. Casper squeezed his brother's shoulders, then disappeared into the bathroom. Benji pulled up the live feed of the bugged car, driver and guard. The bugs were new tech, untraceable by any known scanner but provided full audio and a 360 view around itself. Three grainy feeds came up: the back of the SUV, the driver's view of the SUV, and the inside of a catacomb. The catacomb view was swaying like the wearer was walking. Brandt scanned the view, but the tunnel was empty.

"Keep an eye on it, Benji," Brandt said. "I'm running medical."

"Will do."

Brandt sat Walter, Jane, and Logan down on one of the bunks. "Are any of you critically injured?" Jane was the only one who looked visibly hurt, but he could have missed a concealed injury.

"I got a bit roughed up, but nothing new," Walter answered. "They let me keep my leg, which was quite considerate, despite it all. A bit of ice for my head would be appreciated, though." Brandt started rifling through the medical kit and removed an instant freeze pack, which he handed to Walter. His own head still twinged from getting knocked out, and every muscle in his body hurt from being shocked, but he pushed the pain away.

"Logan?" he asked, as he kept sorting through the kit. "Are you hurt?"

No answer. Brandt glanced up in concern to see Logan staring hard at the ground. Casper had said he was seventeen, but to Brandt he looked so much younger, too young to be involved in all this.

Jane noticed, and looked over at Logan. She pressed her shoulder against his, and he seemed to relax some. "I'm okay," he murmured. Brandt glanced at Jane for confirmation. She nodded, her eyes opening and closing slowly.

"All right, Walter, Logan, you two go and keep watch with Benji. When Casper gets out of the bathroom, tell him to monitor the security cameras." Walter rose and went to join his nephew. Logan didn't move until Jane nudged him gently. He walked off without a word.

"All right, Sweet Jane," Brandt said, dragging the kit closer to the bunk and taking the space Walter had just vacated. "Let's take a look at you."

Jane smiled softly at the nickname. Benji had coined it, after the Velvet Underground song. It came out sometimes.

He started carding gently through her hair, looking for the source of the blood.

"Ethan was there," she murmured, her eyes shut.

"Yeah," Brandt said, swallowing the fear in his throat. There– a wide gash on the back of her head, swollen with infection. "Yeah, he was."

"How…?"

"Honestly, I don't even know." He started irrigating the wound.

"Why did he stay behind?"

"They bargained," Brandt said. "You, Walter, and Logan for him. They want him for something."

"What's the plan?" She hissed as he hit a particularly bad spot.

Brandt paused. "I don't know. He said he had a hunch."

Jane bit her lip. "It won't be enough." The fear in Brandt's stomach deepened at that. Usually Ethan's hunches were better than most plans, and Jane knew that.

"Did you ever see these guys, Jane?" Brandt started applying antiseptic.

"No. They just kept me in the cell with Logan the whole time. We were just bait. They want Ethan, not us. I never saw their faces or heard their real voices."

Brandt swallowed hard. He hated this. He hated everything about this. They should be in there, with Ethan, backing him up on this. He'd been alone on this mission long enough. But now they had no choice but to trust him to figure it out on his own.

He's made it this far. He'll be fine. We'll all be fine.

He taped off the cut on Jane's head, trying to keep the adhesive from getting in her hair too much. Then he fished out the bottle of heavyweight painkillers and shook a pill into her hand. He chased it with an anti-inflammatory. "Stay hydrated. You're concussed, and you're running a fever from that infection, too. We're in a holding pattern until the rendezvous, so try to grab some sleep. I'll wake you up in two hours if nothing happens."

Jane nodded, her eyes already sliding shut. "Sounds good. Keep me posted."

Brandt nodded. He helped her lie down and situated the thin pillows to cradle her head. Then he turned to go.

A slender, powerful hand slid around his. Brandt stopped. Jane had thrown her other arm over her eyes, but she murmured, "Thanks, Brandt. Glad you guys are safe. Don't scare me like that." The exhaustion– and relief– in her soft words was palpable, and Brandt felt some of the taught anxiety in his gut ease. He squeezed her hand back in response, then left her to her sleep.

Benji was hunched over the monitors, Walter beside him. Brandt ran a gentle hand over his shoulder as he sat down. "Anything?"

"Nothing yet," Benji replied. "The ones in the car are just waiting outside the church. The third is still walking."

"Mmm." Brandt scanned the monitors and saw Benji was right.

"How's Jane?"

"She'll be fine." Brandt ran a hand over his hair. "She's resting."

"And the lads?"

"They'll both be okay. When this is all over I'll pull some strings at HQ. Make sure they get treated better than after their mom died. At the very least they'll both need a lifetime of therapy after all this."

Benji nodded. They watched the monitors in silence for a little while, until Brandt started to feel the weight of the last wild few days weigh on him. This was strangely familiar, this scene– he and Benji looking at screens, Jane asleep, Ethan absent but in their thoughts. In some twisted way, it reminded him of home.

He was beginning to zone out when Benji tensed next to him. "Brandt. Look."

Brandt looked up. There– the third screen. The walking agent had entered a dimly lit, small room. Three other men, all wearing black masks, stood around a chair in the center of it.

Zip-tied to the chair was Ethan.

Brandt's breath caught in his throat. Even in the grainy feed, he could see the blood on Ethan's face and shirt, the way his already strained arm hung limp at his side. Worst was the knife that pinned his left foot to the floor.

Brandt's stomach rolled.

"We have eyes on Ethan," Benji called. Seconds later, Jane was kneeling next to Brandt. He doubted she'd slept at all.

Casper appeared. "Casper," Jane said sharply, "you and your brother go into the other room. Don't let him see this."

Casper paled a little, but obeyed.

They stared at the screens.

For a few long moments, there was silence. Then:

"Thieves must be punished, Agent Hunt."

Ethan glared at the ceiling. Even through the feed, Brandt could see the classic cocky petulance in his friend's face. If he could still get pissed off, maybe they had hope.

"Generally, when several people hear a disembodied voice, they say they're being haunted." Ethan spat blood onto the floor. "Good thing I don't believe in ghosts."

"Oh, don't you? You yourself have been one. I have been one. That's how we were trained."

Brandt knew he should be telling Benji to try to run voice decrypting on the speaker. He should be looking for leads. But he couldn't move. They all watched, riveted.

"Oh, so another agent, are you?" Ethan rolled his eyes. "What is this, a turncoat gig? You're going to torture the IMF codes out of me?"

"No need. I know them already. That's not why you're here."

"Interesting. Then why am I here?"

"That's quite simple, Agent Hunt."

One of the black-masked people stood behind Ethan. Something glinted in his hand.

"No," muttered Brandt.

"The IMF took what I love. They killed her and cast her aside. Yet every time you died, you came back. They took you back. They love you. They love you."

The masked man held a long knife to Ethan's throat. Benji and Jane stood up and cried out.

"So I take what they love. Their golden boy. And from your team– whom I know are watching– I take their leader. And with him, their hope."

What happened next transpired too quickly for any of them to fully process.

The masked man drew the knife across Ethan's throat in a quick, savage yank. Blood flared.

Just as he did, Ethan threw his body backward in the chair against the man holding the knife.

Through the audio feed, a distant explosion, then a deep rumble. Frightened shouts.

On the driver's screen, they could see a plume of dust and smoke coming from inside the church. Then, fire.

The last thing they saw before the feed on the third agent's screen went to static was the room caving in.

Screams cut through the dust.

Then, silence.


	13. Sedona

Ethan walked carefully. The corridor was dark and the ground was uneven, and he had a feeling that if he stumbled, one of the two silent men close behind him would take it as an excuse to shoot or hit him. He cast his other senses outward, picking up on the long echoes of their footsteps and the reek of dust and gravity. A tiny chill gathered at the base of his neck. Ethan swallowed. His strained shoulder throbbed, and a clamor of fear was banging on the gates of his self-control.

He couldn’t think about the others. He couldn’t. They’ll be fine, he told himself, warding off the static. Brandt will lead them. They’ll be fine.

He was on his own again. From here on out, he was the only one watching his back. And while Ethan had been in this position many times– hell, he thrived in it– there was a pit in his stomach now. It had been so long since he’d had a team to come back to. He was scared of what it would do to him if they didn’t make it out–and what it would do to them if he didn’t.

Focus up, Agent.

Ethan wiggled his arm minutely. The spike of pain cleared his head some. They walked on through the dark.

After a few more minutes, they turned left into an even darker corridor. 

Without warning, a fist collided with his lower back.

Reflexively, Ethan grunted and arched, whirling around and throwing himself to the side of the tunnel. But the man was too quick. A kick landed hard on his diaphragm. Ethan gasped for air, and in his moment of weakness, a piece of scratchy cloth was lashed around his eyes and tied tightly at the back of his skull. His hands were yanked behind him and bound. His shoulder sang with pain. Someone ripped off his shirt, and then worked his shoes and socks off his feet. The cold, damp air of the Catacombs raised goosebumps on his exposed skin.

Ethan wheezed. He was pulled roughly upright. He coughed, struggling to breathe in. It felt like his chest cavity had been filled with fire.

“You know,” he muttered, “you could’ve just put the blindfold on. It’s not like I’m going to run out of here.”

He was shoved hard from behind. They kept walking.

Ethan counted the footsteps in his head. Two left and one right turn later, at four-sixty, he was stopped again.

His hearing strained. He could hear someone else in the darkness. A soft breathing. The men shifted behind him.

Whoever was across the room moved. Soft footsteps crossed the room toward them. Ethan tensed, following the sound. After a moment, the room went completely silent.

There was the scrape of metal over Kevlar. Knife.

Ethan threw himself to the side. Air moved just to his left, followed by a snarl. Ethan tried and failed to free his hands or scrape off the blindfold. Strong arms bear-hugged him from behind and stopped him fast.

Ethan bared his teeth in a grin at the faceless attacker. “At least buy me dinner first,” he said, his voice edged. “I don’t usually murder on the first date, but maybe I could make an exception.”

He needed time. He needed to get free. Needed to get out–

The person shifted again, and this time, Ethan couldn’t move free.

Pain exploded in his foot.

Ethan had been stabbed enough to know what a knife wound felt like. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for this. He howled in the shock of it, doubling over. Nausea rolled in his stomach, and for a moment his thought whited out in agony. He forgot where he was, who he was.

Then, with each forced breath, reality crept back, and his training kicked in. Ethan took stock. The blade had gone all the way through, until what felt like the end of the hilt was pressing into the top of his foot and the tip of the blade was buried in the packed earth floor. At least three of his tarsal bones had been broken, maybe shattered.

He bit down on his tongue to keep from vomiting, and kept very still. His ears rang.

Then, someone grabbed his injured shoulder and wrenched his arm back, tearing the socket apart again.

Ethan’s world whited out again, taking sound and sensation with it.

Pain came back first. It seeped like lava up his leg and down his torso. Ethan blinked, and realized his eyes had been uncovered. He was zip-tied to a chair. Three men in black masks stood around him. The room was small, circular, and dimly lit by bare yellow bulbs that flickered occasionally. His ears were still ringing, and his hands were beginning to get cold from constriction and blood loss. The dirt under his left foot was sticky. Ethan tried not to move. Nausea curdled in his stomach, alongside something more sinister: dread.

He couldn’t run. How was he going to get out of here if he couldn’t run?

The men around him were silent. Ethan scanned the room. There was one entrance, straight ahead. It was small and opened onto darkness.

“Isn’t the whole ‘underground lair’ a little cliché?” Ethan asked the men. There was a camera in here somewhere. Maybe he could find it. “With the flickering lights and everything? Very Bond villain, don’t you think?” He tried not to think about how hoarse he sounded, or how his mouth tasted like iron.

The men stayed silent, but a voice came from the ceiling: “You would know all about villains, wouldn’t you, Agent Hunt?”

Adrenaline pushed out some of the pain. Ethan didn’t let it show in his voice when he answered, “I suppose I would. Though something tells me we may have a different definition of the word, given my current position.”

There it was: a tiny crevice above the door, and a miniscule red light within. Ethan stared at it, unblinking. “But I wouldn’t call someone who speaks behind a camera and lets their men do all the dirty work a villain.”

“Oh? What would you call me?”

Ethan let slip a feral grin. “A coward.”

Silence. Ethan didn’t look away from the camera.

In the darkness before him, through the entrance, came the sound of a door opening. Footsteps sounded down the hallway.

A man entered the chamber. He was slight and tall, with pale skin and long, bony fingers. He looked at Ethan with a quiet, potent hatred in his washed-out blue eyes. Ethan couldn’t stop the soft sound of surprise that escaped him.

“Jonathan Fitzpatrick,” Ethan said. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

He hadn’t seen the ex-IMF agent in at least four years, since he’d been declared MIA and disavowed on a mission somewhere in the Middle East. Ethan had kept his eyes open, but never picked up any rumors when he was in the field. He was more than a little surprised to see him here.

“I could say the same for you, Agent Hunt.” Fitzpatrick approached Ethan and stopped about two feet away. “Less than a dozen people even know you’re alive at the moment, so I suppose, to the IMF, you are very dead.”

Ethan sighed, trying to tamp down on the mind-numbing pain. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” He looked around the room. “So what, you’re the orchestrator of all this? Seems a bit over the top.”

Without warning, Fitzpatrick lashed out. His punch caught Ethan on his optic ring, and Ethan’s head snapped back. His ears rang louder.

Right. Okay. This kind of asshole.

“You never could shut your mouth, Hunt,” Fitzpatrick spat. “Ambrose was right about you. You’re a fucking pain in the ass.”

“I get that a lot,” Ethan muttered, working his jaw to try and dispel the ache in his head. “You knew Ambrose, huh?” 

Fitzpatrick scoffed. “Before you shot him? Yeah, I knew him. I know a lot of things, Ethan. Like how your agency uses its people and then throws them away like broken toys.”

“The agency you swore allegiance to,” Ethan spat back. “You knew what you were getting into, Fitzpatrick. They keep a lot of secrets, but they didn’t keep that one. It’s a terminal career path.”

“They could be better!” yelled Fitzpatrick. “They could care!”

“And this is how you’re going to change it?” Ethan scoffed. “By murdering Berns and Harvey, two agents fresh out of field school? By kidnapping my team, and killing me in a sewer where no one can see? I’m sure that will be very effective.”

Fitzpatrick started to pace. Unstable energy vibrated around him. He gnawed on his thumb. Ethan had seen enough agents lose their equilibrium to this degree to know what he was dealing with. Fitzpatrick had snapped long ago.

“Who did you lose?” Ethan asked. “Who was it, Fitzpatrick? Friend, sibling?” Ethan lowered the pitch of his voice. Time to see if his hunch was correct. “Lover?”

Fitzpatrick sniffed in, hard. He looked around, looked down, shifting and snarling like a rabid animal. Despite all of his training, a primal aversion crept up Ethan’s senses at being tied down and injured like this in the presence of a person this deeply unhinged. He started to flex his one working wrist. The zip tie didn’t give at all.

Time to find something else that would break, then.

“How did it happen?” Ethan pressed. “Did it start small? Just a passing glance, a bump in the hallway? Maybe you bought them coffee?”

Fitzpatrick stopped moving. He stood a foot away from Ethan, eyes fixed and empty on the floor.

“Something went wrong,” Ethan continued. “Something happened to them.”

“Her,” Fitzpatrick said. “It was…her. She was married. She wouldn’t listen to me. Said she wasn’t interested.”

“And you couldn’t handle that, could you?” Ethan pressed.

“Then they sent her on a mission,” Fitzpatrick went on, as if in a daze. “And she didn’t come back. And then they killed her husband, and abandoned her children. And I– I had to take care of them. I had to avenge her.”

And just like that, it clicked into place.

“Elena,” Ethan said. “You were in love with Elena Williams.”

“And they promised me I could do it,” Fitzpatrick straightened. “No one from within the IMF would see it coming. A dead agent and a rogue organization, going after their golden boy.” Fitzpatrick suddenly lunged down, planting his hands on the arms of the chair. His face was inches from Ethan’s. “I proved them wrong. I proved them wrong, because here you are, and here I am. And they kept their promise.”

Ethan’s head was reeling, his blood was leaking out his foot, but he had to know. Something Fitzpatrick had said. “Who promised you? Who helped you do all this?”

Fitzpatrick breathed in harshly. “Them,” he answered. “The Syndicate.” He grinned maniacally. “How poetic, wouldn’t you say, Hunt? The rogue nation you’ve been after all this time, under you very nose? What you think is dead will always come back to bite you, Hunt. You of all people should know that. And I am your ghost, your reaper, coming to collect what is due. This is where the road ends for both of us.”

There was almost too much for Ethan to process. Days of running injured, blood loss, fear, and now this– the Syndicate was real. And it was looking less and less likely that he would live to tell about it.

Footsteps echoed outside. Another man entered, and Ethan recognized him as the one who had escorted his team out earlier.

Which meant, if they had followed protocol correctly, that Brandt, Benji and Jane were watching right now.

Ethan wanted desperately to signal to them, tell them what Fitzpatrick had just told him, but he dared not give away his single tiny advantage. Maybe Fitzpatrick would out himself. Ethan refocused– his vision was getting fuzzy– and he realized that Fitzpatrick had retreated behind the man who had just entered, out of his line of sight.

Of course. He was ex-IMF. He could anticipate many of their moves.

A new voice sounded in the darkness, coming from the camera. It was unfamiliar. “Thieves must be punished, Agent Hunt.”

Ethan rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, so another agent, are you?” He and the voice went back and forth for a few seconds. Fitzpatrick looked on, seemingly amused. Ethan flexed his wrist again. This was deteriorating quickly.

He was fairly sure Fitzpatrick intended to kill him and then kill himself. But if there was another party involved here, somehow linked to the Syndicate, then even if Ethan managed to escape, he wouldn’t be able to get very far.

His team. He just needed to get out, and get to this team, and they could figure it out from there. Like they always did.

The new voice fell silent.

“The IMF took what I love,” Fitzpatrick said. “They killed her and cast her aside. Yet every time you died, you came back. They took you back. They love you. They love you.”

One of the men had moved behind him. Ethan tensed as a knife was held to this throat.

Fuck.

“So I take what they love,” Fitzpatrick continued. “Their golden boy. And from your team– who I know are watching–I take their leader. And with him, their hope.”

A veil settled over Ethan’s consciousness. He recognized it, though it was rare. His humanity had just stepped aside and yielded fully to his instinct. And then he knew what he had to do.

Just as the knife was yanked over his throat, Ethan gathered all his remaining strength and hurled himself and the chair backward.

Fresh pain flared at his throat, and true hell was unfolding in his foot. The back of his head caught the man on the nose. The man dropped the knife and wheeled back, yelping. Ethan landed hard on his back, the chair cracking but not breaking apart.

Suddenly, from down the tunnels, came a rumble.

The smell of sulfur and dust and a blast of heat roared through the room. The floor shook.

For a small, bright second, every living thing in the room froze as the ceiling above them cracked. Dust showered Ethan’s head and stung his eyes.

The ground rumbled again.

And then, with a sound like breaking bone, the room caved in.

The last thing Ethan saw was darkness.

The last thing he felt was pain.

And the last thought in his mind was: Sedona.


	14. Home

At first, Brandt believed Ethan would keep his promise.

Even after the church collapsed and burned down to rubble, he believed.

Even after they came to Location Shakespeare and waited for Ethan until sunrise, only to walk away alone, he believed.

And even after they returned to the States and resumed normal work, trying to keep face like nothing had happened, each of them trying to move around the collapse within their hearts, he believed.

It was only around the six-month mark that his hope began to fail.

Life went on, as life is wont to do. Jane was reassigned to a new team. She didn’t hate them, but Brandt could sense her constant throb of loss, though she hid it well. Sometimes he would see her when she returned from a new assignment. She would come in to the men’s locker room when she knew it was empty and he was inside in the shower. He didn’t sing anymore. Somehow, she still knew his schedule, and he would emerge from the steam to find her sitting on the bench, nursing a drink, and he could see in her eyes and stance that no matter how well her new team worked, their camaraderie hurt more than it helped.

Benji was almost worse. He’d gone back to desk work, so Brandt saw him more often. He’d retreated into himself in a way that Brandt would never believed he could. Though he still cracked jokes and played Halo when he thought no one was looking, all his attempts at levity seemed crippled somehow. Dark circles took up constant residence under his eyes.

Brandt had gone back to desk work too. Head assistant to the Secretary. The job was good, interesting. But he never stopped missing the thrill of the field, though he knew that he wasn’t ready to go back. Maybe he never would be.

He’d thought that nothing could hurt more than Croatia. He’d been wrong. Somehow this hurt more, knowing that Ethan was, in all likelihood, gone for real this time.

They’d lingered in London for a week after. They returned to the sewers through which they’d entered, evading the EMS and the British police, seeking any clue, any hope, of Ethan’s escape. They found nothing, and gradually the information was gathered by local police. Benji hacked into their system and learned that only two bodies had been retrieved from the rubble, both crushed beyond identification. The explosion was still under investigation, but London police suspected arson. It had originated directly under the church, within the Catacombs.

It didn’t sit well with Brandt. There was more going on here than they knew about, of that he was sure. But he couldn’t see it. For once, his flexible mind could not draw the picture for him, offer solutions, ideas, answers. He was too tired. His grief ran too deep.

At first, for a few dark weeks, he hated Ethan. He hated Ethan, and he hated himself. The four of them had compromised themselves through their love for one another. What made them strong and capable in the field was now breaking them. They should never have stayed together as a team. The job worked like this. One of them was bound to bite it sooner or later. They should have known better than to think that this team, this small, dysfunctional family, could ever last.

He once said so to Jane. They were at a bar on a Saturday night, anchored to a table, throwing back bourbon like water. They could both put away their liquor. It had been three months since London with no developments, and they each needed to turn their emotions off for a little while. When Brandt muttered his dark feeling aloud, Jane grabbed his chin and stared him hard in the eyes.

“Don’t you ever think that, William Brandt,” she snarled. “You take it where you can. Doing so otherwise is cowardice.” Then she got up and left, leaving him to puzzle out her words. It wasn’t till the next morning, when he woke up hungover and salt-cheeked in his apartment, that he understood.

Some things transcend the job and its circumstances. Sometimes love, and looking after one another, are the mission. Ethan had always believed that. He had acted on it many times. It was part of why he was so good at what he did. Even though he’d lost a lot of people in his life, he’d loved as fiercely every time, no matter what could happen.

Brandt had never had that kind of courage until Ethan, Jane, and Benji came along. And he was fairly certain that he never would again.

So he clung to Jane and Benji, and they clung back. The three of them were still incredibly close, somehow even closer together in their grief.

Four months after London, Benji and Brandt moved to a new apartment together. It was biking distance from Langely, and they cooked spaghetti and played MarioKart and kept a small herb garden on the windowsill. Jane’s apartment was five minutes away, so at least four or five times a week they would make dinner together. Jane crashed on the couch on weekends frequently. They weren’t healing. They wouldn’t for a while. But they eased each others’ grief.

By six months, the breathtaking pain that had settled in Brandt’s solar plexus was beginning to evolve. It was now less of a fragility and more of a calcified depression. Reality was finally setting in, the stages of grief shifting along. Slowly, each of them began to fully understand life without Ethan.

Brandt nearly quit. The only reason he finally didn’t was because he knew that the only thing keeping him from completely spiraling was the routine engagement of the job, and the weird community that came along with it. So he bit down hard, lowered his head, and worked.

And life went on.

At the seven month mark, Brandt had a panic attack in the middle of the workday.

He’d gotten them as a kid. Clint was always good with him when they happened; he knew exactly what to do. They’d tapered off in his late twenties, flared briefly after Croatia, then stopped. When his chest started to tighten for no apparent reason as he sat at his desk on a Wednesday, he thought at first that he might actually be having a heart attack this time. He managed to get to the locker room and collapsed against the wall, the cold metal doors cooling his shoulder blades, as the panic attack worked itself out. He was so drained and shaken after that he called Benji and asked if he could take him home. They spent the rest of the day watching M.A.S.H. and trying not to think about it.

Even from early on, they were all having nightmares. Brandt would wake up in a cold sweat, the image of Ethan with his throat cut and the ceiling collapsing on him. Sometimes he would go out into the kitchen to find Benji sipping tea, looking small and exhausted. Sometimes Jane would join them after a really bad one.

And sometimes, Brandt wondered how long this would last. They were reaching the point of acceptance. But there is an impossibly wide gulf between acceptance and healing. They could not heal. And Brandt was getting increasingly concerned that they never would. That this would be the one that, after everything, finally broke him.

And then, at eight months, Brandt went out to check the mail.

It was late afternoon on a Sunday in October. The air was getting cold and smelled like dead leaves. Brandt padded in socked feet down the apartment stairwell to his mailbox and retrieved a small stack of envelopes. Without looking at them, he mounted the stairs and went back inside.

Jane sat in sweatpants at the small kitchen bar, working on some post-mission writeups. Benji was sprawled on the couch, typing intently on his computer.

Brandt raised an eyebrow at him. “You coding?”

Benji didn’t look up. “Minecraft.”

Jane snorted. “What a nerd.”

“It’s relaxing!” Benji protested.

Brandt smiled softly and went to sit on the far couch near the TV. He carded through the envelopes. Mostly bills, a letter from Clint and his cousin. Something at the bottom of the stack caught his eye. He pulled it out and inspected it.

It was a simple business envelope. No return address was printed, which was normal enough, but it was the address that intrigued him. It was made out to him, Benji and Jane.

Brandt frowned in confusion. He touched the letter carefully, but the contents felt flat and non-threatening. He gently tore it open and removed its contents: a single small piece of paper, folded lengthwise.

Brandt unfolded it and read it.

And then, with a wild, violent joy, he threw back his head and laughed.

Benji and Jane crowded around him, asking frantically what it was. Brandt stopped laughing and began to cry softly as he held up the paper.

Written in the center, in familiar scrawl, was _Sedona._

()()()

“You sure you’re going to be okay?”

Ethan half-turned from where he stood.

A woman leaned against the passenger side window. She was tall and muscular, with olive skin and black hair, and she radiated a fierce anticipation.

Ethan approached her and gently touched her bicep. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Really.”

She nodded. “You ready to get home?”

Ethan sighed. “You have no idea.”

With a soft smile, she replied, “No, I think I might.”

Ethan grinned. “Of course.” He shifted some weight off his foot. “Elena, I don’t know how to thank you for everything.”

Of all the people he’d expected to wake up to after a room collapsed on him in the London Catacombs, Elena Williams was near the bottom of the list. When Ethan first blinked himself awake and saw the familiar figure next to him, his first thought was, Oh fuck, I’m dead.

He tried to say it aloud, too, and promptly realized he was intubated and couldn’t speak. It was only the pain radiating throughout his body, and the explanation Elena gave once she realized he was conscious, that the truth began to grow clear. She had not, in fact, died on the job, but had taken a particularly dangerous deep cover mission within the Syndicate after one of their operatives kidnapped her husband, a gifted biochemical engineer. Elena had taken the job in an attempt to get him back. The only way to be assimilated was for her to be declared dead within the agency. Her cover was so complete that not even her children could know she was alive. And it turned out, the operatives she had been tracking and working with had been linked to Fitzpatrick. She’d followed him to London, and set off a controlled explosion in the Catacombs to immobilize him. When she sifted through the rubble, she’d found him, still breathing. The area above the chamber they’d been in was solid rock, so all that fell during the explosion was the brick lining. It had made a lot of noise and shaken out hundreds of years of dust, and did just enough damage to pin down Fitzpatrick. Elena took him prisoner and moved him to a safehouse outside of Syndicate control.

She’d also found Ethan, barely alive.

Knowing who he was, she took him back to her safehouse in London. She couldn’t break cover by contacting the IMF or his team, and leaving him in a public hospital opened him up to further Syndicate attacks. The safehouse medical resources were spartan, but enough to keep Ethan alive.

Still, he was comatose for seven months. Elena spared him no details. Cracked skull, severely dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, shallowly sliced throat, shattered tibia, and of course his foot. That turned out to be the worst. Fitzpatrick fractured three of his metatarsals and separated two of his cuneiform bones. Elena, with the resources she had, was able to do little more than set what she could and stitch up the wounds. As she listed his injuries, Ethan realized with a sober pit in his stomach that this was the absolute closest he had come to dying and staying dead.

It took him a month to gain the strength to walk more than a few feet. His foot had healed wrong, and his tibia, while set well, still twinged from injury and atrophy. Elena was still working with the Syndicate, so she was able to do little more than bring him food and supplies a few times a week. Fitzpatrick she kept locked in a small room in a straitjacket. Ethan had spared her no details either about what he had done to her sons. Though Elena needed no added motivation to extract information from him in order to locate her husband, Ethan was pretty sure the drive of vengeance helped keep her going.

Slowly, Ethan gained strength. He worked his foot and leg and shoulder with physical therapy exercises he Googled. He clung to the walls for support. He’d lost a lot of muscle mass, and the effort exhausted him quickly. He spent the rest of his time sleeping, researching, and thinking about his team. 

He wanted desperately to let them know he was alive, but he dared not break Elena’s cover in any way, not even with a letter. So he hacked into the IMF, local traffic cams, CCTV, and looked for them. He needed to know they were doing okay, that they were carrying on without him. He learned that Benji and Brandt moved in together a stone’s throw from Jane’s apartment, and that the three of them still spent a lot of time together. The first time he was the three of them all at once, in an elevator cam going up into Langley, something unknotted in his lungs. They were okay. They had all made it back.

Finally, eight months since London, Elena found her husband and broke him out of the Syndicate. She brought him to the safe house so he could recover, and Ethan wrote a one-word letter to his team, hoping they would understand its full significance.

Two weeks later, they were on an IMF jet out of London, bound for D.C.

For home.

And now they were here, Elena seeing him off at Dulles. She and her husband were bound for the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where their sons had been set up in a proper safehouse and school system, courtesy, apparently, of Jane Carter. Elena had heard it through the grapevine –something about Jane performing an armbar on the head of Extraagency Affairs until he signed the papers. She and the rest of the team checked up on the boys regularly until they were settled in fully. At hearing that, Ethan had warmed with gratitude and pride.

Elena grasped Ethan’s hand where it rested on her arm. “You don’t need to thank me, Ethan,” she said, softly but sincerely. “If anything, I’m glad I could repay you and your team for looking after my children. I never meant for them to get involved in all of this.”

“That’s how family is sometimes,” Ethan murmured. “Getting involved. I’m glad we could help.”

Elena tugged on his hand and pulled him in for a hug. She avoided his shoulder, also still not fully healed. “Thank you, Ethan,” she whispered in his ear. “We helped each other. Now go home, to your family.”

They drove off into the gathering twilight, leaving Ethan standing on the curb with little more than the clothes on his back. But he wasn’t afraid or uncertain. A deep, relieved peace washed over him, and he breathed in the air of his home city, relishing in it.

He hailed a cab, and gave an address. Not long after Ethan was being dropped again at a familiar street. He had just enough cash to pay the fee, and then the cab drove off too, leaving him alone.

In front of a very familiar apartment. This was his first time seeing it in person, but he’d viewed it countless times on CCTV. It was Benji and Brandt’s new place, and Ethan quite liked it, all the more so because the door into the main stairwell was unlocked.

He knew the number. He limped up the stairs slowly, mindful of his foot and leg, leaning hard on the banister.

Then he was there. He leaned his ear against the door, both catching his breath and listening. He could hear voices inside, and it didn’t take long to pick out all three of them. A current of desperate excitement charged Ethan down to his bones. He straightened, backed up, and knocked their secret knock.

All conversation within immediately ceased.

The door cracked open. Blue eyes peered out.

For a moment Ethan couldn’t breathe. “Brandt–“

From inside came the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked. Ethan froze. Brandt’s face was jet white and cut from stone.

“It’s not my job to protect her,” Brandt said, monotone. “Whose is it?”

Ethan was so exhausted and excited all at once that it took him a few seconds to

realize was Brandt was talking about.

“Mine,” he replied, his voice hoarse. “It’s my job to protect her. Just like I told you on that pier in Seattle, just after Cobalt.”

For a single, endless second, Brandt didn’t move.

Then a clattering thump came as the gun was dropped, and the door was thrown open, light and scent and familiarity pouring out, Jane and Benji crying out and rushing toward him, and Brandt grinning, tearing up, saying, “You absolute son of a bitch.”

And then they were embracing him, somehow avoiding his injuries, hugging him all at once and flooding him with love and all the smells of what had come before all of this mess. Benji was crying, Jane and Brandt were laughing and crying, and Ethan found himself crying too as he was swept up in the head-spinning joy of being free, safe, home.

In a little while, he would sit them down, and tell them everything that had happened. He would listen as they filled him in on what had transpired in his absence. They would return to their equilibrium, their balance between one another, four parts now making a whole once again.

But for now, Ethan was happy–really, fully happy– to just stand here with his team. The past didn’t matter, and they had nothing to fear from the future. They were here now, together, and that was all that mattered.

Eventually, his foot and leg failed. Brandt slung his good arm over his shoulder, and Benji and Jane supported him as they led him inside the apartment.

And for the first time in far too long, Ethan leaned into his family, reveling in their love and warmth, as they crossed through the doorway and carried him home.

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. I cannot thank you enough for seeing this fic through to the end. Your support and desire for more has kept me writing. This fic spans nearly four years, from my last days in high school to over halfway through college. It sat dormant or active through ups, downs, good times and bad times, transitions and changes and a lot of personal growth. This fic is a hot mess, but I love it and I’m proud of it and I hope you all have enjoyed reading it. Thank you all so much for reading.


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